Experiments in Listening (Performance Philosophy) 9781538144282, 9781538144299, 9781538178409, 9781538178416, 153814428X

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Ethics of Alterity

PRAISE FOR ETHICS OF ALTERITY This innovative and original work interrogates the condition and performance of alterity across poetry, film and a range of visual and literary arts. Weaving together political philosophy, phenomenology and theories of language and embodiment, Ethics of Alterity poses fundamental questions about the claims to be made by the Self and the Other and the responsibility that arises in their relation. — Gabrielle A. Hezekiah, OCAD University Ethics of Alterity pulled me into a creative optimism. Building upon delicate observations and a well-crafted exchange between theories and ideas, Jörg Sternagel brings together the aisthetics of human existence and the ethical core of creative thinking. However, this book brings forth more than a theoretical interplay, it paves and inspires a way of living, in which experience, observation and ideas comprehensively interact. Ethics of Alterity is a heartwarming celebration of human nature and culture, and of the great potential that our ‘being-among-others’ has. — Einav Katan-Schmid, Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and the Arts The title of this book calls to mind the fundamental difference Kierkegaard established between the gravitas of ethics and the free play of aesthetics. The author takes up phenomenology of corporeal and intercorporeal existence as developed by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, dealing with motives like the alien visage, substitution, hospitality, and the language of the sexes. This responsive kind of phenomenology leads to surprising encounters between Theodor Adorno and Charlie Chaplin, between Jacques Derrida and the jazz musician Ornette Coleman, or between Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Celan. — Bernhard Waldenfels, Ruhr-Universität-Bochum In Ethics of Alterity: Aisthetics of Existence, Jörg Sternagel takes on what might be called the paradoxes of embodiment, how we are present and absent to ourselves, how we are connected but distinct from others, and how our senses constitute and are constituted by the social world. Sternagel interweaves literature, poetry, art, and theatre with philosophy mirroring the way in which our own existence is permeated constantly by the world. The ethics of alterity is a responsibility that arises out of our embodied response-ability and capacity to transform the world through our art, our philosophy, and our shared human life. — Talia Welsh, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga 

PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY

Series Editors: Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Reader in Theatre and Performance, University of Surrey, UK Will Daddario, Independent Researcher, Asheville, NC, USA. Alice Lagaay, Professor of Cultural Philosophy and Aesthetics, Design Department, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany. Performance Philosophy is an always-emerging interdisciplinary field of thought, creative practice, and scholarship. The Performance Philosophy book series comprises monographs and essay collections addressing the relationship between performance and philosophy within a broad range of philosophical traditions and performance practices operating across multiple art forms and everyday life, including: dance, choreography, movement and somatic practices; music, sound, and silence; drama and theatre; performance art; sport; meditation and spiritual practices. It also includes studies of the performative aspects of life and, indeed, philosophy itself. As such, the series addresses the philosophy of performance as well as performance-asphilosophy and philosophy-as-performance. Rancière and Performance Edited by Colette Conroy and Nic Fryer Experiments in Listening By Rajni Shah Art Disarming Philosophy: Non-philosophy and Aesthetics Edited by Steven Shakespeare, Niamh Malone, and Gary Anderson The Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought By Paul Magee Ethics of Alterity: Aisthetics of Existence By Jörg Sternagel—Translated by John R. J. Eyck

Ethics of Alterity Aisthetics of Existence Jörg Sternagel

Translated by John R. J. Eyck

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2023 by Rowman & Littlefield All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available ISBN: HB 978-1-53814-428-2 PB 978-1-53814-429-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 978-1-5381-7840-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 978-1-5381-7841-6 (ebook) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

The translation was funded by the translation funds at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste.

“The relation of the self to the other, difficult to think (relation that the he/it would ‘relate’) because of the status of the other, sometimes and at once the other as term, sometimes and at once the other as relation without term, relay always to be relayed; then, by the change that it proposes to ‘me,’ ‘me’ having thus to accept itself not only as hypothetical, even fictional, but as a canonic abbreviation, representing the law of the same, fractured in advance (thus again—according to the fallacious proposition of this morcellated self, injured intimately—again a living, that is to say, full, self).” —Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 6.

Contents

Foreword: A personal response to Ethics of Alterity xiii Tony McCaffrey Acknowledgments xvii Introduction xix Chapter 1: Opening Up Before Opening Up



1

Chapter 2: Being Visible, Rendering Visible, and Being Invisible Chapter 3: Prosthethics





19 37

Chapter 4: Face, Mask, and Visage



51

Chapter 5: Responsivity of the Lived Body Chapter 6: Moments of the Ethical



69



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Chapter 7: Pathology of the Lived Body



Chapter 8: Aesthetics of L’écriture Feminine Chapter 9: The Event of Hospitality



107

125 143

Chapter 10: Vita Communis



161

Chapter 11: Ethics of Ethics



179

Notes

197

Bibliography Index

227

241

About the Author



249 xi

Foreword A personal response to Ethics of Alterity Tony McCaffrey

This book speaks directly to me. After my first reading I continue to go back to it. I carry on the dialogue the book has inspired in me in my present work in theatre making and research. The book is with me as a challenge to acknowledge and respond to the alterity in my work and in what I laughingly call my ‘self.’ I approach this text as somebody who has been working for 19 years to make theatre with, and latterly increasingly alongside, learning disabled artists. This work constitutes a kind of immanent performance philosophy. I have approached and engaged with the ‘other’ of my learning disabled co-researchers in a range of ways, informed by a range of supposed philosophies, ethics, and aesthetics in the practical, everyday, common or garden meaning of those terms. Some of these have been half-baked, hamfisted, caught up in chasing efficacity of various kinds: the professional, the sentimental, the avant-garde, the political in an engagement with marginalized others. This book interests me because for me the meaning of alterity is at once practical and theoretical, it is a matter of poesis, of making, and, crucially, concerns the underpinnings of how and why we make theatre together. The intentions of the book align with my thinking, feeling, and working as they have been formed in response to the alterity in the relationship that continues to form with my learning disabled collaborators and co-researchers. Sternagel characterizes an emergent relationality that goes beyond cause and effect, subject and object, and intention and outcome. His work is located in the interdisciplinary, inter-relational area of investigation that is the emerging and generative field of Performance Philosophy, in his words ‘a productive xiii

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field of tense interplay.’ What I particularly like is his formulation that the tensions of, broadly, philosophy and performance, are never resolved but go on influencing each other, clashing with each other, braiding and unbraiding. This aligns with my experience that in performance the philosophical confounds the simple and, equally, the simple the philosophical, but that there is a beauty in this confounding. Sternagel’s book speaks clearly and provocatively of the confounding, colluding and complication of performance and philosophy, of ‘intentionality with performativity . . . action with processes and events, models with making and experimenting, diagnosis with experience’ and in doing so articulates many of the dilemmas, aporia and fruitful contradictions of my research that seeks to understand, acknowledge, and feel the contribution to learning and art of learning disabled artists. This book speaks to me in many voices. The text is decidedly and affirmatively ‘polyphonic’ allowing others to have their say, using citation as presence allowed to others, an acknowledgement of the presence of others in the thinking of the book and in the emergence of ethical moments. Sternagel draws on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of existence that avoids the dualism of body and soul but points toward a unity between the two that is ‘enacted at every instant in the movement of existence.’ ‘Aisthetics’ for Sternagel leans on Aristotelian ‘aesthesis’ moving beyond the application of the term merely to art and beauty but toward ‘the material, perceptual and sensory dimensions of everyday bodily existence’ In my particular reading I connect this expanded notion of aisthetics with Neil Marcus’ ‘disability is an art, an ingenious way to live’ and the work of Arseli Dokumaci in Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Hospitable Worlds (Duke University Press, 2023). Sternagel’s book has influenced my thinking and practice in terms of expanding what is understood as the performance of disability performance. English has a particular colloquial expression ‘What a performance’ that has a similar force to ‘what a palaver’ ‘what a fuss’ a meaning of performance that the Oxford English Dictionary defines as ‘a difficult, time-consuming, or annoying action or procedure.’ This is the ‘performance’ behind so much disability performance in theatre: the struggle for access, physical and material conditions that will accommodate disabled minds/bodies. This is the alterity of disability that needs to be taken into account in very practical and material ways. It is also the alterity that disabled people experience that forces them to make an aisthetics of their existence. The responsive ethics Sternagel advocates also must allow for the othering experienced within themselves by disabled people. This is something that is often ignored in an ethics that merely posits ‘the disabled’ as ‘the Other.’ Encounters with disability are present and vibrant throughout the book and generate beautifully specific and productive questions of what constitutes a responsive ethics. These include the encounter of Theodor Adorno and

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Charlie Chaplin with Harold Russell, the disabled actor with prosthetic hands who won the 1947 Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Best Years of Our Lives. Sternagel sensitively and illuminatingly analyzes the embarrassment or shame of Adorno faced with shaking Russell’s ‘hands’ which he attempted to cover with a kind of laughter which was then immediately re-presented to him by Chaplin with his gift for finely observed and responsive mimicry. The awkward but ethically productive encounter recalls for me the almost paradigmatic encounters of non-disabled and disabled that Lennard Davis characterizes in Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and Other Difficult Positions (New York University Press, 2002). These also include Sternagel’s discussion in Chapter Three of Hoerle’s image of the Prothesenkopf and the lingering resonance of this in the later chapter that centres on Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other with respect to its subtitle The Prosthesis of Origin. The book is full of extended references to and citations from novels, poems and film brought into encounter with philosophical texts. This invokes in the reader a feeling of wandering through a constantly shifting perceptual and conceptual landscape in which awareness of connections, cross-references, and contradictions is gently and thoughtfully encouraged. These juxtapositions and appositions linger long in the memory and continue to provoke thought. This access to the book within the book embodies for me the intermediate space in which the relationship to Others is enacted. As a reader I am encouraged and challenged to consider again and again in beautiful specific examples the relationship between the various meanings of both performance and philosophy. More than this, I am struck by these specific examples to question what constitutes my subjectivity. At once encountering Rimbaud ‘I is someone else’ or Dostoevsky ‘Some kind of insatiable compassion . . . was suddenly etched upon her face’ or Husserl and the child and the scissors in the encounter with Sternagel’s own sense of alterity and disability as a left-handed child brought up to be right handed. The flow of the book then takes us to Matisse and Silhouette. The book also makes me consider the status and place and affective presence of the ‘example’ itself that kind of abstracted encounter with its particular blurring and intertwining of conceptual and perceptual topology. This book speaks directly to me, to the me that has been assembled in response to the learning disabled artists with whom I work and for 19 years have struggled to listen to meaningfully. It prompts in me a journey of clarification. My next book is about how theatre both gives and takes ‘voice’ from learning disabled artists. Sternagel gives me the possibility of thinking of this relationship as one of in-betweenness, of responsivity and responsibility. It makes me question how I respond to learning disabled people, it makes me question how I can listen as a physical and ethical response. The book

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provokes in me a thinking of disability as the mark of alterity, the disability of the other to which I must face the call of response and the otherness of the disability in me and the need for a responsive ethics that opens up the possibilities of a mutual and inter-relational care based upon an ethics of alterity. I feel a physical relationship with the book, that I could carry it with me and let it talk to me of the constant need to respond to the other as I make my way cack-handedly and through bouts of shame and embarrassment to consider, to respond corporeally to alterity in myself and others. —Tony McCaffrey, lecturer, National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Art, Christchurch, New Zealand, author of Giving and Taking Voice in Learning Disabled Theatre

Acknowledgments

This book is translated from the German by John R. J. Eyck, to whom I am very grateful for his hard and thorough work on the different texts and source materials. The translation was funded by the translation funds at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. I am very thankful to the members of the selection committee for deciding to fund this book and to Marie Therese Wieser for her support. In the process, I am very grateful to the anonymous reviewers and to the editors Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Alice Lagaay, and Will Daddario of the Performance Philosophy books series as well as to Natalie Mandziuk, Yu Ozaki, and their team at Rowman & Littlefield to make this project a reality. Many thanks go to Tony McCaffrey for writing a personal response to this book that is included here as a foreword. I am indebted to Gabrielle A. Hezekiah, Einvav Katan-Schmid, Bernhard Waldenfels, and Talia Welsh for endorsing the book and providing their comments for publication. I am very grateful to the photographer Andrea Gaytán Tassier who bigheartedly permitted the use of her Polaroid image titled “Oculus I. Contemplating Strangers” for the cover art of this book. Her work can be experienced in Hep Magazine and on Instagram, for example. For the permission to use a quote by Maurice Blanchot in the epigraph of this book, I thank the State University of New York Press. For the permission to use the poem “I Can Still See You” by Paul Celan, I thank Persea Books and Carcanet Press. For the permission to use parts of the poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” by Rainer Maria Rilke, I thank Penguin Random House. For the help in preparing the manuscript, I am very thankful to my research assistant Harriet Dierks in the DFG project Visuelle Bildung. The book is based on the monograph Ethik der Alterität. Aisthetik der Existenz published at Passagen Verlag in Vienna in 2020. I am very grateful to Peter Engelmann for generously granting the permission for its translation which is preceded by a new introduction. The original book is developed from the Habilitationsschrift as accepted at the Universität Konstanz in 2019 and reviewed by Beate Ochsner, Isabell Otto, and Dieter xvii

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Mersch, whose support was crucial in also realizing this book for which I am very thankful. All of this could not have been made possible without Nadja Ben Khelifa, to whom I am especially grateful.

Introduction

At the intersection of Performance Philosophy and literary, art, and media studies, this book takes specific situations and their concrete settings into consideration. In the course of this examination, it no longer only asks what appears and is experienced, but also how and in what way something appears and is experienced as something. Not only action or knowledge becomes the center of attention but above all the path along which we recognize potential in every situation. Conventional conceptual distinctions assumed from the start in Performance Philosophy as well as in literary, art, and media studies are thus repositioned amidst theory and praxis, juxtaposed to one another on a productive field of tense interplay: intentionality with performativity, for example, action with processes and events, models with making and experimenting, diagnosis with experience. In this way a tension arises that only succeeds by originating from this juxtaposition, yet not with a distinction that concludes in a correlating comparison, whereupon each of the poles goes its own way, encapsulated in its own specificity. The distance, therefore, is manufactured in order to keep the once distinguished and separated poles still in the field of vision, for only as a result of the distance do both of them remain in juxtaposition to each other in this interval that has emerged. In this in-between that opens up as a result of the distance, both are able to enter into a relationship, leave behind their self-sufficiency, and overcome the limited nature of their relation to self. Questions are thus posed about the essence, manner of manifestation, and means of formation for what is in-between, from and by which every given incident originates and develops. In this way, we walk along the path toward Others. The ethics of alterity is enacted by way of an aisthetics of existence between us. Touching upon the Aristotelian concept of aisthesis, the material, perceptual, and sensory dimensions of everyday bodily existence are highlighted to move beyond what aesthetics in modern philosophy just specializes in, namely art and the beautiful. The notion of existence is therefore borrowed from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who understands it as something concrete xix

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and richly interrelated, so as to avoid the dualisms both of psychological processes of consciousness and of physiological mechanisms. It is thus made explicit such that the unity of body and soul is not any arbitrarily arranged connection between “subject” and “object” but, rather, that it is enacted at every instant in the movement of existence. Imaginatively then, the book puts into writing how alterity not only can be treated theoretically but can be also made accessible through writing as well as rendered relatable through reading. That is why it deals with exemplary interpersonal encounters in the lifeworld, in the arts, and in the media, which are initially thematized as intercorporeal experiences, so as to enable an approach for an ethics of alterity by way of, in particular, sites located within a phenomenology of perception oriented towards the lived body. In these ways, the book is devoted to one of Performance Philosophy’s central themes: Being-correlated (in-Beziehung-Sein) or, as the case may be, Being-situated-dialogically (Sich-In-Dialog-Befinden) with Others. The strategy chosen is media-philosophical, one in which media-theoretical knowledge is elaborated in philosophical texts and in concrete constellations pertaining to media, in the way these become relevant and are brought to bear in, say, art, literature, and film. Doing so opens up an intermediate space (Zwischenraum) in which the relationship to Others is enacted, which the book at hand establishes as posing an ethical problem. Central to this position is the (in-)capability of dealing with Others, the question of behaving in the right way and of being responsive/responsible vis-à-vis oneself and Others. This problem posed is made accessible by way of basic aisthetic constellations of existence, over the course of which phenomenological theories of perception move into the foreground, making questions of alterity accessible in taking corporeal ways of existing as their point of departure. In the process, pivotal points of reference for this theoretical unfolding are selected writings of Emmanuel Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Bernhard Waldenfels. Starting with these thinkers, we take a wide look back into the history of philosophy, to Plato and Aristotle, for instance, in order to develop the argumentation in dialogic references and delimitations. Objects of this critical analysis of alterity are thus not just the pertinent philosophical, political, and/ or philosophical-literary reflections—ranging from Hélène Cixous to Jacques Derrida through to Hannah Arendt—but also the intuitive analyses of poems, novels, artworks, and films. The way the book is written likewise follows this principle of dialogicity: involving different forms of encounter with texts and theories, it also deals with the recognitions, provocations, and presumptions that these encounters mandate thinking about. The book is divided into eleven chapters that make different dimensions of an ethics of alterity accessible. The sequence of the chapters is neither

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sequential nor linear. In composition and style, the investigation instead circles around the central theme and reprises it. What matters in this regard is to textualize this ethics of alterity itself, bringing its uneasiness and its surprise into the text. It becomes part of its movement, fixing nothing and preempting no one but, rather, negotiating that which demands, anticipates, compels thinking. The process, then, is poetic and essayistic, entwining and concentrating descriptions of exemplary situations with one another by way of its intended compository rigor, instead of deriving them exclusively by definition and method. The text of the book is therefore decidedly polyphonic, allowing Others to have their say, quite concretely and literally in the form of extended citations. It allows readers to attend different artistic, literary, and philosophical situations and, in this way, interweaves and dialogizes manifold, diverse encounters. In chapter 1, “An Opening in the Openness,” the Pensées of Blaise Pascal provide a point of departure for unfolding the relationship between Self and Others. The Self sees itself as being insurmountably confronted with corporeally situated Others and challenged by their difference. It is consequently not fulfilled in itself but, rather, subjected to Others and always already lagging behind them. The uniqueness of Others calls out the ethical question regarding the correct position and the right disposition in view of their respective singularity. This dis-position (Ver-Halten) belongs to the problem posed by the performative, by the carrying out or acting out of these positions vis-à-vis Others. In this way it becomes clear that artistic treatments of the intermediate space of alterity are not simple illustrations of a theoretical connection but are instead crucially involved in making the argument. Pursuant to this, as the chapter further shows, is Levinas’s reading of Paul Celan, which relates the philosopher in his search for a way out of forgetting Others to the poetic act of movement toward Others. Consequently, alterity emerges also through the encounter of philosophy and literature, which is subsequently shown by Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Marcel Proust. From Remembrance of Things Past, Swann’s description of an initially musical notion reenacts the philosophical-literary figure of thought intertwining what is visible and present to the senses with what is invisible and absent from the senses in encounters with Others. Chapter 2, “Being Visible, Rendering Visible, and Being Invisible,” unfolds alterity as it interacts with image and mimesis, so as to focus considerations on responsive intermediate happenings in interlacing corporeal experience and artistic praxis. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception constitutes the point of reference: the perception of the world is conceived to be an immersion in its density and in correlating objects that are experienced. Connected to it are considerations on theories of the visual from, among others, Waldenfels, Emmanuel Alloa, and Dieter Mersch, so

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as to point out along with them its dimensions in media theory: images are identified as media through which we look at the world’s objects that in the process, however, prove elusive in their mediality, consequently remaining invisible in their imagery. This chapter’s considerations are tied back more in depth to questions of performativity—with the art of the film actor Charlie Chaplin in particular, and the experience of that art by Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno—and further specify alterity as a responsive intermediate happening of mimetic references to Others. Aisthetic and ethical dimensions of the performative are developed on the levels of seeing, hearing, and touching; that is, on the levels of the senses. These pose initial questions as to the manner and way we live and to the claims awaiting us and their consequences. Taking as its point of departure the Prothesenkopf (Prosthetic Head)—a linocut by the German artist Heinrich Hoerle that was used for the cover of the Turkish edition of Théophile Gautier’s novella Avatar (first published in French in 1856)—chapter 3, “Prosthethics,” is concerned with contours of what is human. These outlines in the linocut, and beyond it, suggest that what is human is no longer what is involved here exclusively but, rather, also its replacement with the aid of prosthetics, which take the place of parts of the lived body (Leib), its appendages, or organs. Whereas these contours are visualized in the case of Hoerle in that they concern parts of the body, Gautier textualizes them by relating the entire body, which is completely swapped out: as the result of a healer, Gautier’s gravely ill protagonist Octave de Saville acquires the potential to slip into the body of another person, ensuring him as an avatar not only his well-being but also the affection of a hitherto unattainable love interest. By way of their artistic work on these themes, both Hoerle and Gautier make it possible to reflect on a kind of prosthethics, resulting from a prosthetic, because they open our gaze to what can and cannot be replaced or exchanged. It connects, along with Arthur Rimbaud and Levinas, to a reflection that centers their thinking in responsibility for other persons and, doing so, the concept of substitution in responsibility for Others. Chapter 4, “Face, Mask, and Visage,” presents Levinas’s ethics of responsivity, particularly in the critical analysis of his often debated and also criticized engagement with the visage of the Other. In the process, the relationship of addressing and rendering responsibility (Ver-Antwortung) with the Self and the Other are seen in relation to three modes of aspect via the ways face, mask, and visage are made manifest. Starting with Giorgio Agamben, the many-layered and historically changing relationship between face and mask is thus elaborated as a relationship of acknowledging and identifying an individual, as the process of becoming an individual in the eyes of the Other. In the relationship between face and visage, on the other hand, it is the Other’s nudity and vulnerability becoming recognizable that obligates responding. Here, in referencing research that critically analyzes Levinas’s

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argumentation—by Judith Butler, in particular—questions of the political are connected, as these arise from the presence of a third person, one who alters the encounter between the Self and the Other and possibly draws even the enemy’s visage into ethically posed problems. In this chapter, too, literary references—to Paul Valéry and Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, for instance—are important, especially in the case of Levinas, in fact, and his description of the relationship to the Other, bringing again the dialogic confrontation between literature and philosophy into the text. Waldenfels’s philosophy of the subjective, lived body (Leib) is introduced in chapter 5, “Responsivity of the Lived Body,” in regard of responsivity as a corporeally anchored act of responding, which recognizes that corporeality always also includes alterity. One’s own lived body cannot be thought without the Other. The Other’s subjective body is always already present; I am living in the visual field of the Other and do not belong to myself entirely; I exist in the world together with Others. The lived body as a basic phenomenon is involved in constituting all other phenomena. Connected to this thought, the concept of intercorporeality (Zwischenleiblichkeit) and the close associations with the phenomenology of alienness are discussed; these are so crucial to Waldenfels, because they render recognizable the responsivity that happens between the Self and the Other as a confrontation with what is extra-ordinary and as a demand on the Self. As part of this discussion, especially Mikhail M. Bakhtin proves to be an important source for bringing to light and demonstrating this concept of responsivity, in the way the phenomenology of the lived body centrally anchors poetics, polyphony, dialogic communication, and manifestations of media in the intermediate domains of responding. Taking center stage in chapter 6, “Moments of the Ethical,” are Merleau-Ponty and the contemporary research on him. Three recent positions in the secondary literature are outlined: Anna Orlikowski’s critical analysis of the ethical dimensions in Merleau-Ponty’s later work; Alessandro Delcò’s resituating of dialogue with the Other in forms of creation within MerleauPonty’s thinking on Being; and Frank Vogelsang’s critical analysis of identity, which as a result of encountering the Other, does not stand in dichotomous contrast to difference but is determined instead through a plurality of differentiations. In the repeating, encircling gesture made with this book’s writing style, this chapter also deals with intercorporeality, although here two aspects in the critical analysis of Waldenfels are added, further specifying the central argument of the present study as a whole: for one, the alienness of the Self becomes the focus of our considerations: Even I encounter myself as alien, just as this I is an alien to Others; for another, the central connection between aisthesis and alterity is illustrated even further, as when discussing, for instance, Merleau-Ponty’s observation of a man who awakens to protect himself from the blinding sun with his hat, whereupon it becomes clear to him,

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the Self, that the devastating effects of the world also touch, and touch upon, the Other. Thus, on the field of perception, in the varieties of relations, a bond is established between me and Others who are in the world and belong to it. Chapter 7, “Pathology of the Lived Body,” closely attends to literary descriptions of corporeality and alterity, focusing on two very different works from literary history: The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka and the autobiographical novel The Body Where I Was Born by Guadalupe Nettel. At the forefront of the chapter is the question how relationships of alterity admit of bodily suffering—the sources of which, following Sigmund Freud, can be determined as threefold: from one’s own objective, physical body; from the external world; and, finally, from relationships with other persons. Gregor Samsa’s becoming an insect as well as the ocular suffering of the protagonist in Nettel’s novel can be described as experiences that befall or alienate the Self. They are linked to a pedagogy of practicing in a world characterized by relationships with Others, on the one hand, while merged with the praxis of writing, on the other hand. From the pathologies of the subjective body and, in the end, its mortality, the latter both offers and calls for the way out of isolation, as readings of Maurice Blanchot highlight. Whereas the prior chapters made cursory reference to questions of corporeality and alterity inevitably thematizing gender and sexuality, chapter 8, “Aesthetics of L’écriture Féminine,” focuses on them, namely, by featuring Cixous’s insistence for a woman writing her self. Doing so is not a matter of dichotomous relations between the sexes but, rather, of the philosophicalliterary extrapolation of an écriture feminine and a feminine desire. Both serve as points of departure for thinking alterity in line with Cixous, specifically and in the first place, as a movement of writing. This move is formed in an im-parting, a-scribing, and ad-dressing; by the force of its poetry, by the alterity of Others, and by part-taking in and with Others, it comes back, from the Others, in a reciprocal move that seeks what is collective. Thinking alterity in line with Cixous consequently means not opposing any ontologically fixed Being-female to any Being-male. Instead, liberating feminine desire from social exclusions means allowing various webs of relationships between persons to form in speaking and writing, to admit of manifold, diverse ways of living. As Cixous’s writing about Adolf Eichmann further shows, however, there are also limits to this admission of interweavings with Others, which a politically motivated disposition toward Others also mandates for an act of thinking that writes. Derrida’s concept of monolingualism is central to chapter 9, “The Event of Hospitality,” consequently deepening the relationship of alterity as a relationship of corporeal perception that is condensed in linguisticality and textuality. The native tongue, in the way Derrida develops it primarily in Monolinguism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin, is constantly opening up a space

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for alterity, since an antecedent split inheres in it. According to Derrida, the native tongue is neither unique nor unequivocal. It cannot be completely possessed or appropriated. I have only one language, and it is not mine. My “actual” language is a language that I cannot appropriate for myself. My language—the only one that I understand how to speak—is the language of the Other. Through the semantic chain of “hospes,” which Derrida extrapolates following Emile Benveniste, the various dimensions between hospitality and animosity immanent in language are outlined. In Derrida’s dialogic analysis of the jazz improvisations of the Black musician Ornette Coleman and of Arendt’s native Jewish-German linguisticality in exile, the alterity of language acquires concrete historical and political points of reference. Connecting directly to Derrida’s reading of Arendt, chapter 10, “Vita communis,” elaborates the move toward the Other in Arendt’s philosophical writings. To Arendt’s way of thinking, the Vita activa constantly plays out between persons. Making distinctions recognizable and opening up an intermediate space of the collective, plurality, and/or plural singularity is consequently a foundational fact for what is human, an “inter-esse” in the persons around us (our Mitwelt). This section works out how Arendt also conceives of a Vita passiva that takes pain and desire out of the collective world, throwing the Self back onto itself. By way of Arendt’s retrospectives and her critical analysis of what was repressed in the National Socialist past, the role of poetry and language in this web of human relations comes into play, leading back to (native) linguisticality. In this native tongue, poetry—as a linguistic interruption or caesura heading our way—takes on significant value in the discourse about a past that must remain unresolved. The concluding chapter 11, “Ethics of Ethics,” returns to the philosophical questions posed at the start and, in line with and based on Waldenfels, outlines basic features of a responsive ethics, while opening the investigation to current questions of responsibility in being faced with persons who are refugees. The point of departure for considerations in this chapter is again a text found at the intersection of philosophy, pedagogy, and poetry: it introduces the terms proflection, reflection, and atension as conceived by the Austrian philosopher and pedagogue Franz Fischer in order to describe the movements between Self and Other in both their tensions and in their contemplative expectations. Fischer is concerned with the act of practising fluctuation, with the potential for encounter as the back and forth between me and you—as subjects and as objects, informally as well as formally. In line with Waldenfels, these possibilities connect with inquiries into an alteritary praxis that characterizes a corporeal kind of thinking as constantly intercorporeal, always already deriving from the Other. Responsive ethics is consequently based on a specific temporality which is discussed in line with Waldenfels by way of Henri Bergson: What we experience as immutable, beginning with

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the Other, is antecedent to ordering positions and presuppositions and consequently informed by a foundational openness. Waldenfels’s critical analysis of the concept dispositif from Michel Foucault shows that discursive orders and sets of rules do not constrain this openness and creativity from the outset. A responsively developed phenomenological kind of thinking such as this, therefore, is directed toward deviations and shifts, toward innovations and transformations, which also make possible rethinking even instituted forms. We end up, then, with a plea for creative thinking that is to spring forth from the antecedent openness of responsivity in practical positions of an ethics of alterity.

Chapter 1

Opening Up Before Opening Up

The following pages are going to deal with encounters, exemplary interpersonal encounters in the lifeworld (Lebenswelt), in the arts and in the media, which will initially be thematized as intercorporeal. Situating this approach particularly within a phenomenology of perception oriented toward the body will make it possible to approach an ethics of alterity, which will happen by way of an aisthetics of existence: Material, perceptual, and sensory dimensions of everyday bodily existence come into view and remind us of the concept of “aisthesis” in Aristotle’s Metaphysics; for example: “All men naturally desire knowledge. An indication of this is our esteem for the senses (αἴσθησις), for apart from their use we esteem them for their own sake, and most of all the sense of sight.”1 Phenomenologically speaking though, my place-inthe-world (Auf-der Welt-Sein) is being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-Sein) and belonging-to-the-world (Zur-Welt-Sein) alike. The concept of existence in this sense is borrowed from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who understands it as something concrete and richly interrelated, so as to avoid the dualisms both of psychological processes of consciousness and of physiological mechanisms. It is thus made explicit to the extent that the unity of body and soul is not any arbitrarily arranged connection between “subject” and “object” but, rather, that it is “enacted at every instant in the movement of existence.”2 As part of these links, I am surrounded by Others, other persons, who preempt me, who condition my bodily experience to be one that is not solipsistic, and who make that experience possible. In the course of this experience, I am claimed again and again by Others whom I encounter. As disclosed from this experience bit by bit for every human existence bound up with the body, the doctrine of perception is one of being situated in the world, a world in which those Others permanently possess an alteritary imperative: The otherness of the Other is both demanding and inevitable. It is the act of opening up before opening up. This alterity adheres to me as I adhere to it; it is an irreconcilable part of every encounter, whether with myself or with Others; it is alien, because it touches on my sphere of peculiar ownness, goes above and beyond 1

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it, eludes me, in the way even I in my very sphere of peculiar ownness am otherwise, not at rest in myself, made unsettled and unsure again and again. In this way, every encounter between us pretends to be moving against us and to be coming toward us, occurring as something that befalls us. Being personal, fortuitous, or fleeting, it provides resistance that arises in an intermediary realm, between “you” and “me,” for example. With encounters on such a spatial and temporal plane—which includes past, present, and future as well—the intercorporeal encounter also purports to be a (non-)recognizing, a (non-)understanding, and a (non-)responding of a “you” by an “I,” which does or does not react to the Other, to what does or does not move both the Other and them, and which is thus a common or divisive circumstance. In these ways, every encounter is revealed in its enactment and speaks for the (in-)ability to deal with Others. It situates the unfolding of existence in claiming and facing the Other as well as in exchange with them. It puts this unfolding in references to Others’ bodies and to my body, as basic phenomena, in confrontation from both sides; for every body, for my own body, claims me, the others each with their own and other corporeality, respectively, with their finality and historicity, their limits that come to pass on both sides: for me, my body is a limit, for I cannot move beyond it, do not ever have it completely in view—not to mention under control—in the same way the body of Others constitutes a limit for me. For although I have my corporeality in common with them, I am still not the Others, thus do not achieve any ensured recognition in the end, neither about my corporeal self nor about the corporeal self of the Others. In this mélange, however, responsibility comes into view, which renders moments of what is ethical visible by way of questions about How to be, how to be disposed? and which brings these instances into the text, which as encounters in the lifeworld are unsettling over and over again, so as in this way also to be treated anew again and again.3 An ethics of alterity oriented this way thus becomes visible, brought into the text—it becomes part of its movement, rendering nothing and nobody as fixed but, rather, negotiating what is called for, what compels us to think. Thus we are dealing with a way of writing that circles around a kind of thinking that repeatedly takes its chances, that does not allow the Others there, in that place, to be unimaginable, so as to maintain different associations where an ethical as well as a corporeal praxis can be developed by way of philosophical exercises. Prototypes for this praxis will mediate examples by way of perceptions, positions, treatments, and analyses of corporeality. These examples will point out that what we are coming to terms with makes positions possible that are able to assist in dealing responsibly with ourselves and with Others. The movement toward Others comes to pass by way of ourselves, from ourselves, in an intermediary realm, between “me” and “you” toward “us,” ultimately to come from the Other, from “you” to “me.” Preceding the work to recognize

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these movements are their individual perceptual situations, which are differentiated, for example, by way of seeing and being seen, viewing and being viewed; the distinctions come by way of experiencing corporeal presences in which the one stands in for the Other, in the sense of recognizing and acknowledging the existence of the respective Other, so as to have reflexive structures arise in the first place from pre-reflexive planes, or just to be able to bring them into the world at all. These movements also need to be brought into a text that allows Others to have their say and takes them at their word. Such a text, that is, leaves them to their sphere of peculiar ownness, so as to take into view the lifeworld’s constellations of alterity from that place, to be able to render knowable the singularity of the Others; it puts their particularity on view in order to point out their respective, unique vulnerability in this way as well. The resistance that is legible to Others as part of being taken literally thus remains uninterrupted to the extent that it writes itself into the text, taking its readers along toward situational encounters with philosophers who are embedded in what happens in the everyday, who prepare these events, and who interact with the arts and with the media, as well as in additional situational encounters with artists. In this way, longer passages quoted in the text acquire the sense of letting the various voices—the Others par excellence—directly have their say. As part of this sense, the citation takes on a status other than the classic “quotation”: it no longer serves as proof but, rather, as “reenactment” of the Others through the sound and style of their speech, which is why the corresponding passages are not indented, either. In doing so, the actual descriptions of these encounters and interactions are oriented toward the respective corporeal self, which meets with another corporeal self, or vice versa, without determining any sequence or any order at all: it is as yet not the attribution, the individual, the friend, the acquaintance, the passerby, the guest, or the neighbor who thus appears on the visual screen here but the Others in my perceptual field instead, in whose view I stand, without already knowing in which direction I am moving, with or without them, just as they do not know in which direction I am moving, with or without them. In these ways, ethical moments will in the very first instance always arise in what is uncertain, in uncertainty, in incomprehensibility, and in intangibility. 1.1 THE FORCE OF OTHERS At the beginning of his Pensées about the human condition and its interpretation—both of which oscillate in the midst of anthropological and theological passageways—the French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal places the existence of humankind front and center, because “[t]he

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first thing which offers itself to man, when he reflects on himself, is his body: that is to say, a certain portion of matter which is appropriated to him. But in order to understand what this is, he must compare it with all that is above him, or below him, in order to determine its just bounds”: inconstancy, weariness, and restlessness determine the human condition.4 Human nature consists of movement, which comes to its standstill and thus to tolerable rest only in death—“Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness.”5 Pascal describes the position of humanity as one that is subjected to finality, one that can know nothing of infinity nor attain it. Humanity in nature is, according to Pascal, “Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing,” “a mean between nothing and everything [. . .] infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes.”6 Humanity is incapable of apprehending, of penetrating, either the end of things or their beginnings; they remain a mystery, impenetrable, implacably hidden.7 Humanity, therefore, stands in the center of things, it cannot do anything but perceive the middle of things and remains in despair, without being able to recognize their beginning or their end. In moving from the finite to the infinite, Pascal therefore positions humanity in an intermediary space in which the flesh and the senses (le chair et les sens), the spirit (l’esprit), and the will (la volonté) are intertwined with one another: everyday human existence in the realm of phenomena goes hand in hand with humanity’s equally everyday attempts to understand its own self, in personal reflections about truths and happiness, in which even reason (la raison) is thought of as plural and is understood rather in the contexts of unknowing and failing.8 Being of nature and of culture, humanity has limits and moves within limits. To be sure, the human body and senses help humanity to grasp—his body is the first thing which offers itself to him—yet this grasping only helps humanity to be temporarily placated and alters nothing in its inconstancy, weariness, and restlessness. For humanity nevertheless cannot come to know the utmost natural clarity, even in the sense of one’s own origins and supposed divine creation. Instead, humanity gets lost, along with its spirit, in its own thought, in its desire for knowledge and curiosity, which even in its scientific methods cannot be sated with whatever their findings may be. One’s own will remains insatiable. Its originary, organic source is, for Pascal, the human heart (le cœur), the cause of all effects (les raisons du cœur et des effets) that, for example, can be observed in its own particular, inaccessible body, in its irrational beating, in its pulsating wrist, in the midst of things, during a dinner party, for example, and which may end up conflicting corporeal experiences of withdrawal with thoughts of causal reasoning, without being able to derive any knowledge from it that would not have to have started somewhere else

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already: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things.”9 What is the “ego”? The human self is something that is not understood but, rather, experienced in living; it is a self that is not unambiguously but, rather, contradictorily situated, which is not satisfied in double movement, neither as a greater whole, like the entire body, nor by its smaller parts, like the wrist belonging to it, the vessels, and the blood. While the human body is the first thing that offers itself to human beings, they still must compare it with others so that they recognize their spatial and temporal limits. In Pascal, general human knowledge shifts at this juncture toward the recognition of other human beings: “Suppose a man puts himself at a window to see those who pass by. If I pass by, can I say that he placed himself there to see me? No; for he does not think of me in particular. But does he who loves someone on account of beauty really love that person? No; for the small-pox, which will kill beauty without killing the person, will cause him to love her no more.”10 The philosopher answers the question as to the Me in the negative, for the person sitting and looking out the window is not thinking specifically of the other persons passing by the window, even if met fortuitously by their look. Instead, they are probably thinking of an individual they love, on account of that individual’s characteristics, which also include their own judgment and memory as well as their beauty—characteristics that may be forfeited without losing their own ego. As part of these meditations, Pascal asks about where the site is for the ego, which—thus conceived—lies neither in the body nor in the soul but underlies characteristic changes. The attributions of the Other are in comparison to the self, which for its part engages this comparison. Pascal’s ego is confronted with the alter ego.11 The self is not alone and is met by the look of the Other, who in turn withdraws from it, establishing their boundaries. The human condition is not an isolated one; it is one that is connected, social, and political, in open relationships, which are differentiated by way of habit. The attributions of the Other are not simply in comparison to the self, which for its part engages the comparison. They are not any private predilections of the individual or mere results of past actions; they are embodied customs, forces (les forces), by way of which societies develop in relationships of power and even violence as well as raise questions about justice.12 In Pascal’s electively becoming aware and selectively laying out his Pensées, human existence enters into a visual field, on which (1) the self comes to learn that there is an outside that is set with Others.13 In coming to know and to learn about this outside, together with other persons, the self sees itself (2) ex-posed, however, and is claimed by the Other. The Other acts in their singularity and dis-places the self (3) into the accusative case, as an object: the Other looks at me and meets me with his look from the window. Dynamically interlacing these three perspectives of the visual field of human

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existence—inspired by Pascal—we connect to the recognition that, although humanity needs to be in the center, we do not stand front and center: “Mine, thine—‘This dog is mine,’ said those poor children, ‘that is my place in the sun.’ Here is the beginning and the image of the usurpation of all the earth.”14 All of humanity’s busyness is oriented toward possession and truth, which ought to put humanity in the center and means to lift it up above everything; yet possession and truth fail humanity, according to the one possibility put on view here, even on the level of relating to the Other:15 The Other is posited in their singularity and demands priority: not as the image of my thinking but in a corporeally situated difference. Because the individual human being is always already standing in insurmountable difference to the Other, they are not fulfilled in themselves but, rather, desirous. This desiring is not sublated but is echoed in assuming responsibility, in giving. The Other compels the comparison of the incomparable and calls for justice. They are constantly standing there already, preempting me every time. The Other appears in the present and in the infinite alike, exists concretely and incomprehensibly, is by force of their Otherness near as well as infinitely far. By virtue of the alterity of the Other, the self is not by themselves but vis-à-vis the Other always already behind. The egocentricity of the self is gradually lost in this everydayness. Even in the phenomenal realm, it possesses no certain point anymore and calls for another position (ethos). Ways of seeing and perspectives are already shifted in the act of perceiving (aisthesis) toward the act of answering for something.16 In (acknowledging and) coming to knowledge about the Other, acts of intuiting and knowing therefore do not escape this ethical imperative, which pretends to be a dimension of the performative in positions and dis-positions: as a “That,” as if forcing alterity itself, as not negatable, and in the enactment of corporeally situated difference pushing toward the question: Do we do justice to the uniqueness of the Other? In penetrating the ethical imperative, which acts as if it is a dimension of the performative in positions and dis-positions, a theoria of the performative unites in one initial step the observation of connections between speaking and acting with the activity of observing these connections. In doing so, it asks these questions about the praxis of the performative: (I) How do speech and interaction constitute social and cultural realities? (II) How do concrete action situations arise? (III) How can perceiving, doing, and meaning be related to one another?17 In answering questions like these, the concept of performare proves upon closer observation to be one that is vastly differentiated—from linguistics; to cultural, literary, theatre, dance, film and media studies; to philosophy. According to these respective perspectives, it can first of all be apprehended as (1) carrying out speech acts, yet also translated as (2) acting out theatrical or ritual actions, as (3) materially embodying messages in the act of writing,

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or as (4) an emergence of imaginations in the process of reading.18 Appearing as the concern connecting all these very different notions is the interest in the conditions for cultural and social connections, which emerge as part of events and practices.19 Working with the concept of the performative thus displaces our attention and activity into the world, as it were, onto the lived experience of what is happening, and which is not simply a given and cannot be extrapolated via mere facts or figures but, rather, is experienced in a dynamic process in time and space, in dimensions that can be described with activity, making, and fabricating: We do not only talk about the world but, in speaking, we are also doing something inside it. We are not simply placed in the world, everyone alone by themselves, as autonomous subjects. Rather, we exist together with Others, with other human beings. We act and react with our language, our voice, our face, our body, our gestures. In a second step, by way of the theoria and the praxis of the performative, ethical as well as aesthetic dimensions of the performative unfold, bringing together speaking and acting, being and alterity, performativity and mediality, and relocating language, voice, face, body, and gesture in social realities and aesthetic praxis, which render effects and correlations visible and tangible: (I) How is the world described; how is it? (II) How is our Being (Sein) grounded in Being-recognized (Anerkannt-Sein)? (III) Are words able to become deeds? How do we situate language, voice, face, body, and gesture; which performative effects do they generate? These dimensions of the performative, however, are thought through and debated not only from one side, the side of activity, of doing, of speaking, of fabricating, as well as of succeeding; rather, they also belong to another side, a reverse side, which can make an appearance, as it were, and can be grasped from both sides: the side of passivity, of doing nothing, of keeping silent, of refraining, and of foundering.20 Accordingly, the shares of reverse sides in the coming about of social realities and in forms of artistic processes can be described with a not-doing, with negations of action, and with withholding and being-withheld, with restrictions of action, thus provoking questions about cultural, political, and aesthetic kinds of action, which comply with certain economies. In other words, we have to deal with discussing the interplay of individual and society, technologies and potential, power and opposing power, and therefore decidedly also thinking through formulations of artistic limits, drawing up boundaries that prepare the way for the aesthetic first and that, in doing so, make the way for reflection at all possible, limits that are found in an intermediary space: in the midst of those who are different and the individual, of the self and Others, of those on this side and on that side, of what is possible and impossible. How, though, can the role of the arts be understood in such an intermediary space? Can artistic praxis be situated, as it were, in

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this openness of living, which alternates back and forth between ending and unending, speech and existence, experiencing and thinking? 1.2 THE POETIC VIEW Would encountering the writing of a poet like Paul Celan be one that leads to an intermediary space, in which Maurice Blanchot finds occasion to think about this poet’s “poetic affirmation”?21 If I were like you. If you were like me. / Did we not stand / under one trade wind? / We are strangers: both strangers, both of them, whose particular and common alienation keeps the other stranger aside, has to be borne, cannot be altered. Blanchot holds in place what Celan’s movement in the poem “Language Mesh” allows, a movement that is bracketed, that switches at all times between hope (about the ability to access the Other) and truth (about the inability to access the Other).22 I am you, when I am I, as is said, correspondingly, in “Praise of Distance.”23 The self remains by themselves, maintains their sphere of peculiar ownness, and moves toward the Other, opens themselves for the Other, takes on and speaks to the Other; whereas the Other in turn maintains their sphere of peculiar ownness, moves toward ourselves, opens for us, takes us on, and speaks to us. The alterity relationship purported in this way is of a dialogic nature, in which the self is constituted in hopeful expectation as well as in (acknowledged) inaccessibility they come to know with and by the Other being spoken to. Taking on the Other by the self is an act of taking-to-one’s self without assimilating, as part of which the Other makes a claim yet is not claimed: making claims, demandingly, the Other confronts me, draws up their boundaries to me, remains insurmountable, is alien and distant nearness according to Celan; in the light of that proximity our views and paths cross, in a common crossing-over (Über-Gang) toward We, transitioning without my I ever being alone without your You.24 The poet’s view comes to pass alongside this crossing-over; their view is roaming and, while searching for the Other, is met by them. It is precisely here that Emmanuel Levinas sets out and, with Celan as well, unfolds a philosophy of alterity, which at first endeavors a reversal of the genetivus subjectivus and the genetivus objectivus, in a move from the ego, from the subject and its certain, initial placement, in the direction of the Other and their claim, and thus toward uncertain, secondary placement. Put another way, though, Levinas does not position the subject—which is one with the world and part of the world—from the viewpoints of two different angles, positions, or oppositions. Instead, we are subject and part of the world alike, namely, in expression or rather in effect: at this juncture, along with Merleau-Ponty, Levinas undertakes a description of belonging-to-the-world—nota bene at

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this juncture where he does not stand still—one that grasps situations in which my body is like something felt that feels and belongs to the world, as he illustrates in his essay “Signification and Sense” (la signification et le sens): “sensed, it nevertheless remains on this side, the side of the subject; but sensing, it is already on that side, the side of objects; thought is no longer paralytic, it is motion, no longer blind, it is creative of cultural objects.”25 The acting, creative body unites the subjectivity of perception, the intentionality—which is directed toward objects—with the objectivity of expressing, of effecting—which creates perceived objects: “cultural beings—language, poem, painting, symphony, dance,” which are, as Levinas puts forward, “illuminating horizons.”26 The phenomenology of corporeal perception, which in Levinas’s case results in a philosophy of alterity, apprehends perception preemptively as both receiving and expressing at the same time, in one gesture, through which we “are able to imitate the visible and kinesthetically coincide with the gesture seen.”27 Levinas attributes to the body a capacity for mimesis—in the sense of taking on and appropriating what is visible—as well as a capacity for kinesthesia, whereby the latter as a concept is situated as in Edmund Husserl, who in his etymology already puts the body in relation to space and time, in that he combines motion (kinein) with (sensory) perception (aisthesis). The perceiving subject opens up the world by way of its movements, in correlations between the visual and the kinesthetic field. In the body’s own movement, this belonging-to-the-world becomes clear: sensation is a moving sensation; it can carry along with it a kind of attending, taking a look (view), or having a listen (auditory space). In addition, there are moments of rest, in which the corporeal self can also linger, yet in which the objects—always only perspectively perceived in shadows—are still found in motion. In so doing, the perceptual fields are subject to constant alterations, evincing thing (including the body) as well as space: “Therefore the kinaesthetic sensations function, on the one hand, as constitutive of the appearance of things—other things as well as the Body—and on the other hand as localized in the Body.”28 In perceiving, that is, the body is the delegate, the emissary of Being that is perceived.29 Levinas enacts his search for an exit from Being through phenomenologically perspectivizing experiences of the lifeworld, and he writes about corporeality and language by setting phenomenological approaches off against forms of thought from Plato to David Hume, which reduce meaning (la signification) in language—even in its metaphorical and literary variations—to contents that are given to consciousness as a result of intuition, which takes it up directly—in pure receptivity as well; for example, in Immanuel Kant— and to which everything is traced back: everything at hand, relationships, ideas, sensory qualities. “Significations carried by language must be justified

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in a reflection in the consciousness that sights them.”30 Being-conscious (Bewusst-Sein)—even the consciousness of language, which grasps everything only intrinsically, as acts, as thinking or acting of itself—comes to terms with itself and, doing so, runs into limits that consider neither its own existence with its additionally passive, corporeal experiences nor the Other with their own experiences. Even phenomenological perspectives—especially the categorical views of Husserl, which make a return to givenness possible—do not suffice for these considerations called for by Levinas. In Husserl and Levinas, to be sure, the sense (le sens) is given in the directness itself and marks the relationship between the object of thought (noema) and mental activity (noesis). Even so, sense apprehended this way in Husserl remained connected too closely still to intuitions for Levinas and therefore, in turn, to being-conscious (Bewusst-Sein): “Intuition remains the source of all intelligibility.”31 Put another way, any signification whatsoever, any act, is thus taken up immediately in the consciousness and persists in subjective internal observations of the lived experiences of the conscious ego, without rendering tangible spontaneous formations of sense as an occurrence of experience with Others, either. These Others cannot be enmeshed into meanings, concepts, and categories that have been found but, rather, come to the fore and make their claims in processes of the formation of meaning between experience and expression, in effecting. In so doing, no givenness, no thing, no body is already provided with any identity and is also unable to enter into thought by way of “the effect of a simple shock against the wall of receptivity,” as Levinas makes clear.32 That which is given to consciousness must have occupied its site in a horizon, in a world, in advance; it exists in relationships and has sensory qualities. Like the concept of the performative, that of the horizon displaces our attentiveness and activity into the world, as it were, onto the corporeal experience of what happens. That occurrence is not simply given, not disclosed, isolated, or added up as a result of mere facts and figures; instead, it is experienced in a dynamic process in time and space. In Levinas, the concept of the horizon and of the world is discussed by both drawing on and questioning; for example, Husserl’s Logical Investigations and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, in accordance with contextual, linguistic, and cultural models. Horizon and world constitute the site where significance takes its place. Language and experience have significance with respect to the world, from the position of the observing, speaking, perceiving individual. They comprise the subjectivity of perceiving, the intentionally directed nature toward an object, with the objectivity of the expression, with an occurrence that arises, like language as expression in an ontological ordering of corporeal and artistic gestures. That is where we find ourselves coming face-to-face with the Other in a cultural totality, at the

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site of the horizon, where they are present and appear as a result of that totality, like the text as a result of its context. In the creative expression, in which what is expressed is inseparable from the expression, we are subject and part of the world alike. In corporeal experience, expression, effect, and/or artistic creation are set off from one another before the horizon of the world, move that horizon into the light, define culture. Thus they not only take part in the ontological order but are themselves ontological as well, in that they make it possible to apprehend Being, the Being from which Levinas, in particular, is seeking an exit, so as to recover forgetting Otherness, in turning against the primacy of the subject. As part of this recovery, Levinas moves language in particular into the focus of his attention, language as expression, the creative language of poetry, for which he finds a travelling companion in Celan. On the occasion of being awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in Darmstadt, on October 22, 1960, the poet addresses his audience in a speech titled “The Meridian.” In it, Celan talks about the poem as something that asserts itself at the margins of its self. The poem is something that is called and is retrieved in order to exist, “ceaselessly back from its already-no-longer to its always-still,” for “[t]he poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author remains added to it. But doesn’t the poem therefore already at its inception stand in the encounter—in the mystery of the encounter?”33 Celan’s speech, his equally poetic act, moves toward the Other; his text and thus his poem head in this direction: “The poem wants to head toward some other, it needs this other, it needs an opposite. It seeks it out, it bespeaks itself to it. Each thing, each human is, for the poem heading toward this other, a figure of this.”34 From Being to the Other, as Levinas puts forward in his reading of Celan’s “Meridian,” is the lonely, solitary work of the poet, the act of seeking out an Opposite; it turns into dialogue, encounter, the path of a voice toward the You who perceives.35 According to Levinas, Celan selects a language of nearness, of proximity, “older than that of ‘the truth of being’—which it probably carries and sustains”; it is an initial way of talking, a response that precedes the question, preempts it, makes possible responsibility for the neighbor, the one who is near, makes possible the gift as a result of its “for the Other.”36 Though the self remains by themselves, maintains the sphere of peculiar ownness, and moves toward the Other, they still open themselves for the Other, take them on, speak to them, give them the opportunity; whereas the Other in turn maintains their sphere of peculiar ownness, moves toward ourselves, opens for us, takes us on and speaks to us, gives us the opportunity. The alterity relationship in speaking and saying, from Celan to Levinas, from the poet to the philosopher, for the one writing to the one speaking, from the one reading to the one listening and back, is of a dialogic nature, in which the self is constituted. Language turns into saying without asserting, as a result of the call of the Other more than the message;

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it becomes a turn toward something as a result of attention: “rectitude of responsibility before any appearance of forms, images, or things.”37 Taking the Other on by the self is a taking-to-one’s self without assimilating, as part of which the Other makes a claim yet is not claimed. In this crossing-over (Über-Gang), language, the language of the poem, is similarly one of alien and distant nearness; it is contact, apprehending, giving, sign for the Other, in which Celan makes no essential distinction between handshake and poem—which Levinas takes up, so as to think through language as contact in its directness, which in its presence nevertheless does not make possible any access to the Other: neither language nor handshake act—according to Levinas, as opposed to Merleau-Ponty—in intercorporeal continuities but, rather, come to the fore in the ethical relationship as radical separations, which is expressed in language and in giving one’s hand by way of the act of haunting. I am spoken to, visited, even before taking on any meaning, in the primacy of speaking to (Ansprechen) and of the claim (Anspruch), before all semantics. One’s hand is given to me, puts me into the dative case, an indirect object, and makes clear, in alien as well as distant closeness, that I do not have the upper hand myself. The ego has to devote itself to the nonsite of the Other, the site that is not mine and can never be it. I am not the Other. The Other as the one near to me is more of a patient than a friend; he falls into me, befalls me, compels responsibility. The Other is set in their singularity and demands priority: not as the image of my thinking but, instead, in corporeally situated difference: I can still see you: an echo, that can be groped towards with antenna words, on the ridge of parting. Your face quietly shies when suddenly there is lamplike brightness inside me, just at the point where most painfully one says, never.38

The view of the poet roams about in the painful departure to You. The poet looks at the perhaps beloved as they go, can still see them; they, the Other, who still appears, is viewed and heard, like an echo, to be touched via words, as an object of love, of desire and need, in which they, the Other, abide by themselves, unique, unattained, and infinitely responsible: in the ethical imperative, I stand lovingly in the difference. I am called to responsibility, for the other appears to me in their vulnerability; in love, I fear the Other.

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1.3 THE BOND BETWEEN FLESH AND IDEA On the other hand, at the horizon of things—and as part of his philosophical inquiry into the visible and nature, in the midst of flesh and world— Merleau-Ponty runs into, as he writes, “the most difficult point, that is, the bond between the flesh and the idea, between the visible and the interior armature which it manifests and it conceals.”39 Human experience, as lived and lived through, is found in an intermediary realm of world and consciousness. Everything that exists in this space is incomplete, because it is always realized in concrete, corporeal experience, in constant synthesis: I do not think the world; I live it. My ideas of the world can be given only as ideas in my carnal experience. Doing so, every idea is not the opposite of the sensory but rather “its lining and its depth.”40 My thinking is grounded in perception and cannot be separated from my corporeal experience, which I am in no way able to posit absolutely or ever to understand completely, for I am open to the world. I communicate with it, of course, but cannot ever possess it, and so it remains inexhaustible for me. Merleau-Ponty undertakes these sorts of determinations of relationships between the visible and the invisible ostensively with the help of Marcel Proust and his description of initially musical ideas, which he does not put forth as the opposite of the sensory but—in the language of Merleau-Ponty— as secondary visions or a more manageable derivatives, which appear from behind or in the midst of the sensory.41 Here the phenomenologist accompanies the man of letters in his search of lost time, diving with him into Charles Swann’s Parisian world from around 1885. There, in one chapter of the first volume, Proust’s protagonist finds himself of an evening at a soirée of the Marquise de Saint-Euverte, where the marquise is presenting to the company gathered those artists whom she will later have appear at her charity event: following a flautist on stage, who played an aria from Orpheus, comes a pianist who at first presents Franz Liszt’s Saint Francis Preaching to the Birds, an intermezzo, which Swann attends with rather melancholic irony, yet while still precisely observing the musician and two ladies among the company. Both “followed the virtuoso in his dizzy flight; [. . .] as though the keys over which his fingers skipped with such agility were a series of trapezes, from any one of which he might come crashing, a hundred feet, to the ground, stealing now and then a glance of astonishment and unbelief at her companion, as who should say: ‘It isn’t possible, I would never have believed that a human being could do all that!’”42 When the pianist ended the piece by Liszt and then intoned a prélude by Chopin, as Swann further observed, the musician reaped “a tender smile, full of intimate reminiscence, as well as of satisfaction (that of a competent judge) with the performance.”43

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These insinuations continue over the course of the evening, for after the prélude the pianist presents two more pieces by Chopin and segues into a polonaise, arriving in the end, along with a violinist, at a little motif or “little phrase” of Vinteuil’s sonata for piano and violin, fictitiously invented by Proust, which for Swann awakens memories of his former beloved, the courtesan Odette de Crécy: “And before Swann had had time to understand what was happening, to think: ‘It is the little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata. I mustn’t listen!,’ all his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him, which he had succeeded, up till that evening, in keeping invisible in the depths of his being, deceived by this sudden reflection of a season of love, whose sun, they supposed, had dawned again, had awakened from their slumber, had taken wing and risen to sing maddeningly in his ears.”44 In the course of his remembrances, Swann thinks not only of Odette and the first time he heard the sonata ring out in the company of the Verdurins, but for the first time also recalls the artist, the composer. Swann’s thoughts move “on a wave of pity and tenderness towards Vinteuil, towards that unknown, exalted brother who must have suffered so greatly; what could his life have been? From the depths of what well of sorrow could he have drawn that god-like strength, that unlimited power of creation?”45 It must be an “intimate sorrow,” which this little melody “endeavoured to imitate, to created anew; and even their essence, for all that it consists in being incommunicable and appearing trivial to everyone save him who has experience of them, the little phrase had captured, had rendered visible. So much so that it made their value be confessed, their divine sweetness be tasted by all those same onlookers—provided only that they were in any sense musical—who, the next moment, would ignore, would disown them in real life, in every individual love that came into being beneath their eyes. Doubtless the form in which it had codified those graces could not be analysed into any logical elements.”46 On the contrary, Swann considered the musical motifs to be real ideas from another world, “of another order, ideas veiled in shadows, unknown, impenetrable, by the human mind, which none the less were perfectly distinct one from another, unequal among themselves in value and in significance.”47 When he had the motif from Vinteuil’s sonata played over for him again at the soirée of the marquise and “had sought to disentangle from his confused impressions how it was that, like a perfume or a caress, it swept over and enveloped him, he had observed that it was to the closeness of the intervals between the five notes which composed it and to the constant repetition of two of them that was due that impression of a frigid, a contracted sweetness; but in reality he knew that he was basing this conclusion not upon the phrase itself, but merely upon certain equivalents, substituted (for his mind’s convenience) for the mysterious entity of when he had become aware, before ever he knew the Verdurins, at that earlier party, when for the first time

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he had heard the sonata played. He knew that his memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he saw the music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still, almost all of it, unknown), on which, here and there only, separated by the gross darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys, keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by certain great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme which they have found, of shewing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that great black impenetrable night, discouraging exploration of our soul, which we have been content to regard as valueless and waste and void.”48 To be sure, as Merleau-Ponty argues at this juncture, Swann is able to “close in the ‘little phrase’ between the marks of musical notation, ascribe the ‘withdrawn and chilly tenderness’ that makes up its essence or its sense to the narrow range of the five notes that compose it and to the constant recurrence of two of them: while he is thinking of these signs and this sense, he no longer has the ‘little phrase’ itself, he has only ‘bare values substituted for the mysterious entity he had perceived, for the convenience of his understanding.’”49 “In this little phrase,” as Proust continues, “albeit it presented to the mind’s eye a clouded surface, there was contained, one felt, a matter so consistent, so explicit, to which the phrase gave so new, so original a force, that those who had once heard it preserved the memory of it in the treasure-chamber of their minds. Swann would repair to it as to a conception of love and happiness, of which at once he knew as well in what respects it was peculiar as he would know of the Princesse de Clèves or René, should either of those titles occur to him.”50 Not only the musical but also the literary idea as well as the dialectic of love and the forms of light speak to us, as Merleau-Ponty extrapolates with and by this passage in Proust. The ideas have their own logic, their connections, their coincidences and consonances: even when Swann “was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed, latent, in his mind, in the same way as other conceptions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of bodily desire, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is versified and adorned. Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust. But so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lighted, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which has vanished even the memory of darkness.”51 The appearances are concealments of unknown forces and laws, as Merleau-Ponty purports in this regard. The mystery in which they live and from which they are elicited by

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the literary expression, like that of Proust in these passages, is their actual way of existing. As a result, Vinteuil’s motif acquires a share in our mortal destiny, takes on something human that is most profoundly touching. “So Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of the sonata did, really, exist. Human as it was from this point of view, it belonged, none the less, to an order of supernatural creatures whom we have never seen, but whom, in spite of that, we recognise and acclaim with rapture when some explorer of the unseen contrives to coax one forth, to bring it down from the divine world to which he has access to shine for a brief moment in the firmament of ours. This was what Vinteuil had done for the little phrase. Swann felt that the composer had been content (with the musical instruments at his disposal) to draw aside its veil, to make it visible, following and respecting its outlines with a hand so loving, so prudent, so delicate and so sure, that the sound altered at every moment, blunting itself to indicate a shadow, springing back into life when it must follow the curve of some more bold projection.”52 “There were in this passage some admirable ideas which Swann had not distinguished on first hearing the sonata, and which he now perceived as if they had, in the cloakroom of his memory, divested themselves of their uniform disguise of novelty. Swann listened to all the scattered themes which entered into the composition of the phrase, as its premises enter into the inevitable conclusion of a syllogism. He was assisting at the mystery of its birth. ‘Audacity,’ he exclaimed to himself, ‘as inspired, perhaps, as a Lavoisier’s or an Ampère’s, the audacity of a Vinteuil making experiment, discovering the secret laws that govern an unknown force, driving across a region unexplored towards the one possible goal the invisible team in which he has placed his trust and which he may never discern!’”53 Like the science of Lavoisier and Ampère, literature, music, passions represent the experiences of the visible world, researching the invisible and disclosing the world of ideas. Without our body and without our sensory nature, we could not come to know these ideas more precisely, for they would be simply inaccessible to us. “[Vinteuil’s] ‘little phrase,’ the notion of the light, are not exhausted by their manifestations, any more than is an ‘idea of the intelligence’; they could not be given to us as ideas except in a carnal experience. It is not only that we would find in that carnal experience the occasion to think them; it is that they owe their authority, their fascinating, indestructible power, precisely to the fact that they are in transparency behind the sensible, or in its heart.”54 From this condition Merleau-Ponty further concludes that “it is essential to this sort of ideas that they be ‘veiled with shadows,’ appear ‘under a disguise.’ They give us the assurance that the ‘great unpenetrated and discouraging night of our soul’ is not empty, is not ‘nothingness’; but these entities, these domains, these worlds that line it, people it, and whose presence it feels like the presence of someone in the dark, have been acquired only through its commerce with the

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visible, to which they remain attached.”55 In the case of Merleau-Ponty—as with Paul Valéry or Jacques Audiberti, Gaston Bachelard and Celan—this commerce with the visible can be grasped also by way of the secret blackness of milk, to which I have access only through its whiteness, just as the idea of light or the musical idea has an inner lining of lights and sounds that form their other side or depth, their fleshly texture that present what is absent in all flesh. Merleau-Ponty apprehends it as a furrow, too, which “traces itself out magically under our eyes without a tracer, a certain hollow, a certain interior, a certain absence, a negativity.”56 As he puts forth, however, it is not nothing, as it is limited to the five notes, for example, in Vinteuil’s sonata, “between which it is instituted, to that family of sensibles we call lights”—or, put another way, along with Swann, we do not see the idea, we do not hear it, either, not even with “the mind’s eye” or with the “third ear”: “and yet they are there, behind the sounds or between them, behind the lights or between them, recognizable through their always special, always unique manner of entrenching themselves behind them, ‘perfectly distinct from one another, unequal among themselves in value and in significance.’”57 When Swann first hears the sonata, as when he first sees Odette, during that first contact, that first desire, an initiation takes place that does not posit any content but opens up a dimension that, as Merleau-Ponty notes, “can never again be closed, the establishment of a level in terms of which every other experience will henceforth be situated.”58 The idea is just such a level; it is this dimension and thus not de facto invisible, like the back side of a cube or of another object. Yet it is also not absolutely invisible but is “the invisible of this world, that which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its own and interior possibility, the Being of this being.”59 What is visible, sensorily present is intertwined with what is invisible, sensorily absent. Because musical, sensory ideas are negativity, we do not possess them, they possess us. That is why the pianist does not produce or reproduce Vinteuil’s sonata but, rather, that he and the other musicians and the audience have the experience of being at the sonata’s service. That is to say, through them the pianist plays in dialogue with the violinist in open vortices in a world of sound, which then make something whole out of it, in which the ideas are attuned to one another: “The suppression of human speech, so far from letting fancy reign there uncontrolled (as one might have thought), had eliminated it altogether. Never was spoken language of such inflexible necessity, never had it known questions so pertinent, such obvious replies. At first the piano complained alone, like a bird deserted by its mate; the violin heard and answered it, as from a neighbouring tree. It was as at the first beginning of the world, or rather in this world closed against all the rest, so fashioned by the logic of its creator that in it there should never be any but themselves; the world of this sonata”60 The piano’s complaining, the violin’s stopping—every moment of

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the sonata as well as the experiences of being tangible, or the passions and the fragments of the field of light, constitute a cohesion without concepts: “When I think they animate my interior speech, they haunt it as the ‘little phrase’ possesses the violinist, and they remain beyond the words as it remains beyond the notes—not in the sense that under the light of another sun hidden from us they would shine forth but because they are that certain divergence, that never-finished differentiation, that openness ever to be reopened between the sign and the sign, as the flesh is, we said, the dehiscence of the seeing into the visible and of the visible into the seeing. And just as my body sees only because it is a part of the visible in which it opens forth, the sense upon which the arrangement of the sounds opens reflects back upon that arrangement.”61

Chapter 2

Being Visible, Rendering Visible, and Being Invisible

We see the world itself. The world is what we see. In Plato, classical ontology generally related to the visible world (horaton), in order to gather its essence from the forms present in it (eide) or from those no longer visible but, rather, only thinkable (noeton), which are timeless and transcendent ideai as well. Coming to know, recognizing, means a kind of seeing, attentively observing or looking toward, or even an inner look—an intellectual intuition (theorein) that we can no longer enact with our eyes. Doing so designates a priori a conflict between aisthesis as pure perceiving and the thinking situated in the logos—in the case of Aristotle, particularly, in the dianoetic virtues of phronesis and of actual theoria. The visible thus constitutes at most the point of departure that we need to go beyond in regard of the invisible, Being, or the ground (Grund). This notion was theologized in the Middle Ages, and it was replaced in the Enlightenment by the opposition between the ever-deceptive senses and the truth that is apprehended first of all through reason and concepts. At the same time, art—previously a techne for fabricating the best things, that is to say, approximating the divine—edged into the status of a technology for producing deceptively similar images, rendering visible a second reality by means of mathematical principles. Just as the truth only appears to be accessible to ratio and thus without images, art produces conversely a plethora of artificial images that in their own manner lead what remains invisible toward being rendered visible. They are like illustrations, metaphors, for that which does not submit to any visibility, and yet in their unmistakable way they themselves always retain an invisible element. No representation materializes on its own; rather, its ground—the place from where its visibility is organized—remains removed from view, invisible. This dialectic makes a kind of agitation recognizable, one that opens up latitude for seeing between aisthesis and aesthetics, figure and ground, receptivity and spontaneity, activity and passivity, presence and absence, or mimesis 19

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and creatio. Being visible, rendering visible, and rendering invisible are thus interlaced into a tangle that cannot be unraveled, one that in its various facets has tried to make topical, in particular, the art of modernity. That endeavour then poses especially the question as to where we are looking from: from the visible into the invisible, from the invisible into the visible, or from what has been rendered visible in each case into a kind of cache, an invisibility in that which first teaches us seeing. The various epochs of making images are separated in these alternatives. In Plato’s theory of ideas, the visible world (horaton) as a realm of appearances is ordered by comprehending and disclosing the way something looks or its form (eidos). He interprets all appearances to be unsubstantial images, spirit copies (eidola) of prototypes (paradeigma), whose ground is constituted by immutable ideas. His dialectical thinking of image (eikon), form/ gestalt (eidos, morphe), and idea (idea) insists on the continuing existence of archetypes that are not temporal, whereas things in the corporeal being (Sein) pass away. In the “Simile of the Sun” in The Republic, Plato employs light— being the bond between the sense of sight and the capacity of visibility—as a third party that has to be brought in to render what is invisible visible.1 In the “Allegory of the Cave,” the visible world as a subterranean space and the light of the fire burning behind those in fetters stand in obvious analogy to the recognizable external world and to the sun, divided by way of the metaphors of the dark and the light like dividing up the truth into semblance and being.2 Painting and mimetic poetizing do bring about what is visible to appearance, of course, but the images are still illusions without any distinction between prototype and copy and thus only a semblance of what appears.3 In contrast, Aristotle’s ethical theory of experience displaces recognizing and knowing in time and space and situates seeing, particularly in his Metaphysics, as an outstanding sense, by which our recognizing is made most possible, and which makes the many distinctions of beings clear. As a preliminary stage of observing, it serves simultaneously as an aid to knowing (episteme) and thus also to practically coping with life, to the life form that observes, to the vita contemplativa of theoria.4 For Aristotle, as opposed to Plato, the content-rich image in painting supports the apprehension of beings, insofar as its aspect is disclosed, in accordance with poetics, by the form or the execution and the color scheme.5 The imitation (mimesis) of an object consists not only of, secondarily, making it similar but also in its being described as a formative force that makes things visible, which goes beyond mere copying. Like mimetic poetizing, the visual arts also create something new that includes the possibility for coming to know6—in distinction to Plato, who sees in them solely a poor reiteration of the world’s presence.

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In the ways they look at the essence (Wesen) of things, the teachings from antiquity remain in thrall to the cosmos, in an immediate attentiveness toward nature, inside of an order of the visible amongst thing, image, body, soul, and world. Meanwhile, the Christian religion lifts these up to the unattainable, creative activity of God, above and beyond nature: in the way Paul separates them, we do not look at what is visible but instead at what is invisible. “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; / While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”7 Since Augustine and the scholastics, the truth of belief inhabits a person’s interior, renewing itself from day to day, whereas the external person is worn down on the outside by, and indebted to, the visible world. Visible and invisible are united in the image of creation, directed toward what is external in the world or toward the other side, concerned with the spiritual devotion to the invisible and grasped in moving from the material to the immaterial. This orientation, which is generally one of salvation, subsequently changes as part of the conceptual, deductive, and ultimately rational thought of early modernity and the Enlightenment, where the light of reason itself belongs— that is to say, radiates from that thinking—and whereby it is made visible. Perception and rationality then split, and whereas the latter alone guarantees truth, the former is accused of deception and infidelity. As Merleau-Ponty remarks in a decidedly pointed way, “Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see.”8 For whenever there is a gaping split between seeing and knowing, we are capable neither of knowing what we see, nor of seeing what we actually know. Rather, everyday perception and philosophical reflection are interlaced in how becoming visible and rendering visible are sensibly related. Intentional references of sense and signification are constituted in concrete situations and in matter at hand, or out of what happens expressively, enticing toward issues of visual theory. 2.1 LIVING CONNECTIONS An ochre cube, which lies visible before me on a light brown shelf, appears in the afternoon light against the white wall of the room, surrounded by books, disclosing itself to me, in perspectives, references, and relationships: from my present, sitting position, I see only the front of it with one black dot on an ochre, square background; I do not see the entire die, though, with its six equal sides, which as a whole remain invisible. What are de facto visible and invisible enmesh. Regarding it, here and now, comes both from the visible cube and from my perceiving body. I perceive the object in further

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aspects only when I stand up, walk around the table, look at the back of it, and so forth. Cube/thing and room/world are only given to me in their living connection. They are neither thought of themselves nor absolutely set; rather, they appear to be constructed and constitutive alike. What is visible, sensorily present, is intertwined with what is invisible, sensorily absent. With the aid of John Locke, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology puts in particular “adumbrations” (“Abschattungen”) on view: the ochre of the uniformly ochre-colored cube on my light-brown shelf is modified in the interplay between light, lighting, and the shape of the die in many ways as a result of the shadows on the edges, the lights they reflect, and many other things. They cause the ochre color to appear no longer homogeneous yet still allow me to perceive the thing as a die in its uniformly ochre colors by way of these “adumbrations.”9 The cube possesses these “adumbrations,” they belong to its sensory qualities, and every one of its modifications also alters its characteristics, say, as a result of sunlight falling obliquely in the room or the switched-on desk lamp shining in front of it.10 Likewise, the Gestalt psychology around Wolfgang Köhler, Max Wertheimer, and Rudolf Arnheim takes this multiperspectival aspect of a cube as an occasion for their numerous reflections about objects and images. Thus—in the context of art and seeing and in reference to a psychology of the “creative eye”—Arnheim writes about the reductions of perception in regard of the one side of the cube figure: “When we look at a cube head on, there is nothing in the perceived square to show that it is part of a cubic body. This may make it unsatisfactory as a projection, although it may be acceptable as a pictorial equivalent. According to a rule in perception—again in application of the principle of simplicity—the shape of the perceived object (i.e., the perception) is taken spontaneously to embody the structure of the whole object.”11 By way of the principle of simplicity, therefore, ways of seeing and points of view are differentiated, which show the whole to be different from the sum of its parts, and which presuppose both visible and invisible always already as having been structured, articulated, shaped, and organized in sensory experience. In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty anchors them in the groundwork for his theory of the subjective body, showing them to be living connections:12 For me, the world with its objects is a given; experiencing and perceiving, I dive into the density of the world; the cube is already present; I comprehend it in its perspectival appearance, which is disclosed to me.13 To comprehend this relationship of my life toward object and world, as well as the manner and way in which what is visible intertwines with the invisible, there is no one category that is sufficient, like, for instance, cause, effect, means, end, matter and form, stimulus and response. It is precisely perspective that makes recognition possible while I am in the world and belong to it. In the process, elements, objects, objective bodies do

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not stand for themselves individually but are instead determined in a totality as a result of the positions they take toward one another in the visual field, in chiastic positions outside one another (i.e., critical analyses: AuseinanderSetzungen), in actual engagement, in addition to both in and with the image.14 Four select possibilities for a contemporary philosophy of visual imagery branch off from this point forward, each accompanied by a corresponding excursus: first, penetrating the appearance of the image, conceived in the first instance from the vantage point of the image; second, reconstructing the mediality of the image, beginning with looking at the image; third, understanding images in the enactment of performative acts that constitute realities and guide actions, which put forward the performances of an image; fourth, pointing out an interlacing of corporeal experience with artistic praxis, transferred to a triad of image, mimesis, and alterity, in which concepts of a kind of responsivity move into the foreground. All four perspectives prove to be interlaced with one another. From the angle of being visible, rendering visible, and being invisible, they unfold various sides of the nature of visual imagery. To be able to perceive the cube, I must have a lived experience of it. If, using a pencil, I transfer the die from my perspective to a white piece of paper and, so doing, visualize my view of one of the square sides of the cube, then I see this piece of paper as an image lying before me, and I see what this image shows. I render visible and, seeing, I exert influence in going from becoming attentive to making attentive, from a look that is induced to directing a look.15 My looking at the image is a double look: I see the image as an “image of a side of the cube” and the image “as a thing,” as the piece of paper that renders part of a cube visible. The nature of the cube’s visual imagery is distinguished from rendering it visible. However, this difference still remains invisible as a difference. Only the two-dimensional side of the cube becomes visible, appearing by force of the image. As an “iconic difference,” though, it is inalienable for the visibility of the image, stipulated from both sides as well as in their contrast.16 What is invisible, visually absent, is constitutive for what is visible, visually present. In this way, aesthetics remains tied back to a genuine kind of aisthesis. Accordingly, as striking relationships of perception, as shapes and not as sensations, ways of seeing, movements, directions, spatialities, groupings, forms, contours, curvatures, perceptual constancy—as well as chords, melodies, or rhythms—come to be known (and acknowledged), each only consistent by “becoming aware of relations.”17 If the geologist Louis Albert Necker expands my perspective and drafts the die on a new piece of paper with a pencil, this time as a reversible figure without any spots on it but with twelve sides, then he changes the nature of the cube’s visual imagery and opens up polysemous latitude for seeing, with spaces that are interactively disposed

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toward one another: cursorily, I look either from obliquely below or from obliquely above at the paper and view, respectively, a three-dimensional, hollow cube. Along with Ludwig Wittgenstein, I see this ambiguous figure shine out as a cube “in two ways,” as two different facts.18 Or, to take an additional ambiguous figure (from Joseph Jastrow, this time), I see the image either as a rabbit or a duck, as two different aspects that the figure constantly visualizes. I cannot see both aspects at the same time; my seeing is that of one aspect in its difference to the other aspect. The presence of the rabbit is indicated already in the absence of the duck, and vice versa, yet is in no way absorbed into it. What is perspectivally visible, visually present, effects what is phenomenally invisible, visually absent. Rendered enigmatic multiple times, this image asks at this juncture, along with William J. Tom Mitchell: What am I? How do I see? The answer depends on the observer asking the same questions.19 What is invisible, visually absent, is constitutive for what is visible, visually present. What is visible, sensorily present is intertwined with what is invisible, sensorily absent. Between aisthesis and aesthetics, figure and ground, receptivity and spontaneity, activity and passivity, presence and absence, detecting and devising, imitating and innovating, “invisibility [is] indebted to seeing, which fades out or fills in, focuses, or overlooks, due in part to the phenomenon, which obstructs, shades, or superimposes something else.”20 2.2 WAYS OF THE FLESH What is visible has an impact within this framework; it occasions and enables perception without determining it, though it does put perception into perspective and opens up potential latitude for seeing. Merleau-Ponty’s fragmentary, posthumously published work The Visible and the Invisible points out a renewed chiasm in which the flesh (le chair) is “the dehiscence of the seeing into the visible and the visible into the seeing”; it is a “formative medium of the object and the subject,” in which one’s own body is given as well as intertwined with the world around it (its Umwelt), with other bodies and things, in a sensory way.21 The flesh is “an ‘element’ of Being” that is “adherent to location and to the now,” which endows meaning factually and directly.22 It is not any “invisible substratum” but, rather, it permeates “the visible itself as a sensory element.”23 In the broader context of flesh and idea (as “depth” and “lining” for the sensory), what is invisible in this world is the bond “between the visible and the interior armature which it manifests and it conceals.”24 As in Bernhard Waldenfels’s Hyperphänomene. Modi hyperbolischer Erfahrung—the third volume in his trilogy about the organization of experience—it connects to a “carnal ideality” that can be extended to making

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images: in the interplay between the visible and invisible, ideas becoming flesh can concern colors and forms in painting, too, thus creating images.25 Upon closer observation, the thesis for image theory emerges that perception as well as the nature of visual imagery, rendering visible, and iconic difference assure me there is something unnoticed, as in the sense noted on the slip of paper Merleau-Ponty left behind and titled “hidden-revealed: transparency, encroachment”: “This invisible of the visible is then what enables me to rediscover in productive thought all the structures of vision, and to radically distinguish thought from operation, from logic.”26 Put another way: seeing is what convinces me, as the result of an appearance that is already there. To be able to perceive the cube I have to have lived the experience of it. An image is what convinces me, as the result of a seeing that is likewise already there. The world of perception is “the ensemble of my body’s routes” and of every image: “the invisible of the visible.”27 In Looking Through Images, Emmanuel Alloa draws attention to connections between perception and image and, in reference to Merleau-Ponty, puts forward that “rather than objects to be seen in and of themselves, images are media through which we see.”28 Following this sense is a quote from a hitherto unpublished note of Merleau-Ponty: “What is an image? Obviously we do not look at an image the way we look at a thing. We look according to the image.”29 At this juncture, and beyond, Alloa argues in particular by continuing Aristotle’s theory of the diaphanous, of what shines through, questioning it from a decidedly medial phenomenology: “[W]here is what is visible, before it becomes visible? Can we catch a glimpse of the visible in the moment of its emerging visibility?”30 What is visible occurs at the margins of my frontal view, in my prethematic field of perception. Given the potentiality of individual manifestations, like those of the image of the cube, the field is not just invisible but also present, as something prior to thematizing. It is collected and condensed in the here and now, which gradually comes into my focus of attention, like the image of a cube. However, I cannot take the margins or peripheries into view; part of my field of vision remains undetermined. My perception does not mean emergence, as little as it is randomly able “to take into view,” to focus actively; instead, perception occurs much more laterally in that it pushes out of an image into the center and attracts my view. Reconstructing the mediality of the image, Dieter Mersch moreover repositions image and view into a complex play of appearing and disappearing. When I look at the cube, the difference between the image as an image and the image as a thing remains invisible, as a condition of the possibility of iconic visuality. This invisibility “‘draws’ the visual” in the sense of making a mark.31 In this way, the distinction between image and the nature of visual imagery, between medium and mediality, is sketched a priori, predetermined. Vis-à-vis what is portrayed and what is visible, it enters into a relationship

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of negativity, in a reference to what is invisible: without the nature of visual imagery, we see nothing just as, vice versa, the nature of visual imagery itself remains invisible. The image and the nature of visual imagery turn into negative dimensions; they fulfil a constitutive function yet are recalcitrant in their apriority or transcendentality. In a logic of showing that results, the cube in the image is present. The image presents and makes present in the mode of showing. In the process, my look at the image acquires something to see, a figure in front of a background, and I experience nonnegatability; I cannot look away from this image anymore, yield to the force of its making things evident, which—as the first feature of iconic logic—rules out its negation. Admittedly, it allows me a play between figure and background, as Mersch, along with Wittgenstein, puts forth as the second feature for an iconic logic, when taking into account Jastrow’s ambiguous figure, a switch in attentiveness that includes reflexivity. Moreover, what the visual lacks in showing, in positing—as a third feature—is any possibility of holding back and assessing from a distance.32 In a performative move, the image encounters us as a visual event. The image renders something perceptible that is not there without its doing. It encounters us in the mode of its performativity as a visual event. At the same time, it encounters as that which it attests or vouchsafes, by divulging what it makes visible and makes visible by divulging. As an act it is, as Ludger Schwarte puts forth, both an “assertion and asserting” alike.33 In interlacing corporeal experience with artistic praxis—from the triad between image, mimesis, and alterity—concepts for responsivity are therefore able to move simultaneously front and center, above and beyond the performance of the image. These concepts process the superimpositions in everyday perception as responsive intermediate happenings, in which latitude for our own and alien possibilities opens up between the image and the observer, shifting significances. Being affected by something, which sets something in motion, and responding to something, in which this something takes on shape and sense, also shapes the experience. In light of any aporetics of the medial, the structural impenetrability of the concept of media is elaborated as a feature, which applies, as it were, to the concept of image. Without any medium, we see nothing, just as, vice versa, the medium itself remains invisible.34 2.3 PATHOS OF THE ACTOR “His most important characteristic as a screen actor is rhythm. He shows more than he acts. Winking an eye, moving his knee, is almost always enough for him to have us immediately understand what is going on [. . .]. Humanity

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and reality are the bywords that characterize Chaplin’s work and persona. We know only a small snippet of his life, and it is the only one we know.”35 From the perspective of surrealism, Philippe Soupault approaches this small snippet, one excerpt, from which cinema allows us to get to know something more about Charlie Chaplin. Subsequently, Soupault characterizes the work and persona of Charlie Chaplin with bywords like “humanity” and “reality”: Chaplin is also a screen actor and stands as such in the studio, on the set, under the lamps of the projectors, in the light and viewfinder of the equipment filming his movements. “Everything he does is recorded in minute detail. He cannot allow himself any slip-ups, any blunder.”36 In doing so, his most important characteristic as a screen actor is rhythm. Chaplin shows more than he acts. A glance of his eye, minimal movements of his limbs, and slight alterations of his stance are enough for him “to have us immediately understand what is going on.”37 The detail of suddenly blinking his eye, the nuance in slowly bending his knee and cautiously nodding his head, are decisive and show precisely what there is to be shown at this moment, in this place, in the studio, on the set, in this snapshot. In the here and now, Chaplin does not know any superfluous gestures. Sophistication and concentration make him stand out. “Here, it’s the way he walks; here, his way of playing with his cane; here, how he raises his hat, signalling his mood to us.”38 Chaplin tempts us to ask: What do actors do with us, what do we do with them?39 We are not just seeing something; we are seeing what is seen at the same time as the expression of a kind of seeing. Every wave of the cane and lift of the hat that Chaplin performs on the screen is the transcription of a gesture and is itself a gesture. “As far as the composition of a film goes, we must judge it by its rhythm and not by the achieved effect,”40 as Soupault continues. The action of the actor in front of the camera, the staging of the action that is shown in the image, lends to the surface on which the image itself is portrayed “the corporeality, the temporality, and the iconic density of a concrete situation,” by which every observer is touched.41 In this praxis of setting the image and the tone, a potential for action opens up, putting it into the image, onto the soundtrack: in addition, the actor’s corporeal experiences and performed actions in everyday, extraordinary, and grotesque situations and movements are shown pictorially, heard offstage. Corporeal experiences and performed actions alternate between activity and passivity. Action implies nonaction, too; doing, not doing; being active, not being active. In the actor’s experience of immutable events, pathos (πáθος), these occur with a view to meaningful placements in what is visual and on the soundtrack and take part in the transformative power of visual and auditory presence. Accordingly, as an immutable experience, an event befalling us, we understand pathos in its constitutive significance, in the sense of an impetus and a trigger, which the actor originates, approaches, calls out.42 Voice, movement,

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facial expressions, and gestures make claims and take the center stage of perception, in an a priori understanding of their role, before any intellectual construction or identification. Ethical and aisthetic dimensions of the performative unfold as a consequence along medial stagings of actions, which are rendered visible in the image, as a way to access the image: Chaplin opens up an undetermined phenomenal realm of an affective manner, puts perception on stage, becomes an event for what is perceptible, provides stimuli, and prepares the way for the aesthetic. The actor places himself into the relationship between portraying and what is being portrayed, reveals himself, even to irresistible comic effect, is creatively happening, aisthesis, offering orientation and expanding aesthetic experiences with ethical motifs, by posing questions about the manner and way of our lives and about the claims awaiting us. Chaplin’s precision in signaling concentrates life’s manifestations, gathers them together in persistent exertion, and thus reveals, according to Soupault, the actual sense of cinema, comprehending these manifestations in snippets. In this showing, in the everyday world and on the film site as well as on the screen, Chaplin is the one responding, the hypokrites (ποκριτς), leading us into responsive intermediate happenings, in which mimesis and alterity play the main roles: as an actor, he responds to his fellow players on the set, in the image, and for the spectators in the movie theatre before the screen, in the lifeworld.43 Chaplin is not only a player but also a patient, who recovers in reciprocal moments of surprising and preemptive action. “What occurs can be understood as action, though it is more and other than that.”44 What happens to Chaplin is what the situation in the studio or in the lifeworld demands from him. In addition, he is divested and divulges himself. In this sense, with Chaplin, via him, discoveries ensue in the performative chiasm of event, pathos, and responsivity. In mimetic processes, these open up access to other persons and render states of openness visible, which assure us of the richness of corporeal experience and the otherness of Others. Theodor W. Adorno met Charlie Chaplin in person (Levinas did not, as far as we know) and during this meeting, in connection with the actor Harold Russell saying goodbye, was imitated by Chaplin. He wrote about the firsthand experience for the newspaper Neue Rundschau in Frankfurt am Main in 1964, reporting as follows: “Together with many others we were invited to a villa in Malibu, on the coast outside of Los Angeles. While Chaplin stood next to me, one of the guests was taking his leave early. Unlike Chaplin, I extended my hand to him a bit absent-mindedly, and, almost instantly, started violently back. The man was one of the lead actors from The Best Years of Our Lives, a film famous shortly after the war; he lost a hand during the war, and in its place bore practicable claws made of iron. When I shook his right hand and felt it return the pressure, I was extremely startled, but sensed

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immediately that I could not reveal my shock to the injured man at any price. In a split second I transformed my frightened expression into an obliging grimace that must have been far ghastlier. The actor had hardly moved away when Chaplin was already playing the scene back. All the laughter he brings about is so near to cruelty; solely in such proximity to cruelty does it find its legitimation and its element of the salvational. Let my remembrance of this event and my thanks be my congratulations to him on his 75th birthday.”45 In his off-the-record letter of congratulations to Chaplin, the exiled Adorno makes known that he had some concept of Chaplin’s art, which sparked considerations on being affected by him, as well as other actors. With his imitation of Adorno in the aforesaid scene, the “empirical Chaplin”—as Adorno, at another juncture in the article quoted, calls the actual artist he encountered in person—is capable of playing out a sense that becomes clear in Chaplin’s expression, which is shown on his face, with his facial gestures, in his body language and movements. With his mimetic play, Chaplin repeats for Adorno what the latter had lived through before; with his potential for corporeal expression, Chaplin recreates a situation that touches Adorno, affects him, a situation that takes hold of the previous one and takes up the departure of Harold Russell one more time, rendering it capable of being seen and experienced while priming Adorno’s laughter—this laughter sets free what has been caught in his throat, for in becoming aware of Russell’s war injury, it proves to be a kind of laughter bordering on horror. As a consequence, Adorno once more gets his own shame presented to him—or rather: performed for him—the shame that grasps him in shaking Russell’s artificial hand, and which he himself subsequently played down. Based on its closeness to horror, the laughter that Chaplin makes possible is legitimate, for it allows the situation to be revived once more, to become reproducible; at the same time, therefore, the laughter is also redeeming, for it diminishes the terror of the situation; it alleviates, although it heightens awareness, and Adorno conceives of Chaplin’s capacities for miming as having quick presence of mind, as being ever-present. In the final, utopian analysis that transforms everything, they are capable of liberating from the burden of Being-One’sself (Man-selbst-Sein). “It is as though he, using mimetic behavior, caused purposeful, grown-up life to recede, and indeed the principle of reason itself, thereby placating it.”46 With the help of Chaplin and from the situation experienced in his own body, Adorno approaches his thought on mimesis between construction and rationality, in which mimesis creates a sensory means of access in the genesis of humanity during the civilizing process. “The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes a human being by imitating other human beings.”47 Adorno understands mimesis as an exteriorizing move; in it, a bridge is built from the subject to the exterior, a crossing in which the border between subject and object becomes fluid.48

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Mimetic movement is thus taken to be as a process, producing a reference to the Other, who is not incorporated but, rather, to whom we must become similar: the intrinsic value of the opposite moves into the center. To do justice to the latter, “the subject must free themselves from forms of wanting to know better, from a little learning, and open themselves to the non-subsumable, the non-identical.”49 Precisely these experiences are rendered visible in moments like the party on the Malibu coast; they concentrate what is manifold and heterogeneous, in them ensues a setting-outside-itself (Außer-sich-Setzung) of reason itself, in which Adorno becomes disempowered as a subject and his thought must open up above and beyond his limits.50 Adorno’s cringing in horror in his rejoinder to Russell’s departure and Chaplin’s replaying that scene happen carnally, having somatic aspects. Chaplin’s mimesis acted as a corrective, in that he intervenes as an actor and makes claims on his opposite. Adorno’s defence by way of terror and Chaplin’s nearness to the horror go hand in hand. The nonactive pause of Adorno, his passive snapshot characterize in one move its mimetic impetus. Adorno’s immediate impulse, his reaction entering into the physical, and Chaplin’s conduct directly thereafter, his precise gift for gesturing, are in a tense relationship that can be situated between idiosyncratic reaction and post-facto reflection—albeit with concern for taking the situation itself more precisely into view, so as to consolidate the materiality of human existence, to integrate corporeality in its intertwining of what constitutes and what is constituted, to be able to elaborate its asymmetric character.51 The handshake reveals manual relations and stages of lived corporeal experience, which illustrate various ways of conduct and fabricate distinct levels of reference, which cannot be conceived without the claim of the Other, of Russell. The exchange with the Other does not take place on one level, since the Other preempts Adorno’s expectations and notions: giving his hand already means that he is giving what does not belong solely to him.52 It has already been claimed by the Other, and he can take a position only in responding to him.53 In this respect, Adorno is overcome by the alien nature of the Other, as well as of Chaplin; it surprises him, disturbs his intentions and his sphere of peculiar ownness, before he understands it in a certain way.54 From now on, we will be moving with our protagonists between mimesis and alterity, in a responsive intermediate happening. In his early writing De l’évasion (1935, On Escape), Levinas sharpens our view to Being using an example from cinematic history, namely, with the aid of Chaplin and his playing with a thing, a prop, for gradually seeking out an “evasion,” an Ausweg aus dem Sein (i.e., escape from Being), as the title of the German translation by Alexander Chulochowski suggests. Along the way, Levinas thematizes the visibilities of Being, which he experiences—by force

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of filmic images, in the interplay between photography, movement, projection, and sound, by force of the play with an object, more precisely: with a whistle—via the screen actor, via what Chaplin performs in his role as the tramp Charlot in this 1931 film, which he directed himself. Having selected this scene from City Lights, Levinas offers considerations on the actor in the image, whose play with a prop, virtually from the very image itself, sharpens our view to Being, thus bringing existence into the visual field. This move happens in the reduction to corporeal experiences, in going back to them, that is, because Being is well thought out in its facticity itself and what counts therefore in experiencing this Being is only the “discovery of . . . the permanent quality [l’inamovibilité] itself of our presence.”55 In this way, already in On Escape the body ends up in the focus of attention and, with the body, the experience of self, in which Being-with-one’s self (bei-sich-Sein) refers to a “brutality of existence” (la brutalité de l’existence),56 in which the presence of the ego by itself “has value and weight.”57 Thus, the ego is not anything that is sufficient for itself but, rather, something that cannot absolutely be posited, that is possibly torn apart in itself, something not integral, often thrown back on its own potentials and realities, something that cannot be sure of any “internal peace” in the world, in the world along with Others. As Levinas remarks, Western philosophy—that is, idealism (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) and philosophy of consciousness (Husserl)—does not go beyond the “image of being such as things offer it to us”; they are, and Being asserts itself as something that is absolutely sufficient for itself and “refers to nothing else.”58 Being-conscious (Bewusst-Sein)—which grasps everything only intrinsically from itself, as acts, as thinking and acting of itself—comes to terms with itself and thus runs into limits that take into consideration neither their own existence, with their likewise passive, corporeal experiences, nor the Others with the experiences particular to each of them. Consequently, Levinas argues against any primacy of the subject, against forgetting Otherness.59 In this way, Levinas makes a plea for thinking from the perspective of Others, for coming to know (and acknowledging) intersubjective relationships and corporeal experiences, even those that cannot be described by way of acts and actions like, among others, affective, rather passive experiences of nausea and shame, the shame that “arises each time we are unable to make others forget [faire oublier] our basic nudity.”60 At this juncture, nudity is in the first instance a physical nakedness: I am without clothes and my shame results from the look of the Other, but not only from it, for it also proves to be shame for my self, to be an “eminently personal matter,” as the Being-with-one’s self (bei-sich-Sein) already described, by which nudity is conceived also as a nudity of existence, as a nudity of the brutality of

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existence.61 According to Levinas, therefore, shame depends on the essence of our Being itself, of its incapability to break with itself. Again and again, Levinas connects considerations like these with examples of artistic creation. In these passages of his essay it is Charlie Chaplin, in particular, who renders this Being visible and audible, according to Levinas, as in the scene purported by Levinas to be an additional celebration: “The whistle that Charlie Chaplin swallows in City Lights triggers the scandal of the brutal presence of his being; it works like a recording device, which betrays the discrete manifestations of a presence that Charlie’s legendary tramp costume barely dissimulates.”62 Using the whistle, Chaplin performs in this scene that which Levinas means by shameful nudity: shame sets in with the whistle’s noisemaking because Chaplin can no longer hide what he would like to; shame expresses itself because it is impossible for Chaplin to flee from himself, so as to hide from himself that he is chained to himself, because his ego is mercilessly exposed to the presence of itself. Here we are dealing with a laying bare of his Being, of his “deepest intimacy,” of his “most brutal expression,” in which even his suit can no longer hide what it was supposed to, that is, the poverty that in the end the whistle still makes apparent, by which the nudity of an existence shines through, one that is incapable of hiding itself. It is certainly this visualizing of that concern for clothes that can hide, which with this scene, this film, touches Levinas, for in preparation for the cited passage on Chaplin, he discusses this concern as one that involves all the expressions of our lives, our actions, and our thoughts, and which the film revolves around the whole time as well: for here Chaplin plays out the irreversible character of the impoverished tramp, which he had shaped in countless films; he renders visible and makes heard, in the narrative context of City Lights, that there, at the party in the millionaire’s house, this Charlot does not belong, that he never belonged there, even if the millionaire did invite him—a gesture that is repeated over the course of the film—for it is expressed only in the evening, in the dark, in a state that is not sober; in the morning, in the light, it is swiftly taken back. Chaplin plays out the brutal presence of Being by force of a prop, the whistle, and with it renders that presence audible, without his formal attire—the suit that is otherwise always worn with his hat and cane—being able to hide it. Thus, in the interplay with his antagonists—a series of guests, taxi drivers, dogs, guests—he reveals to us the irreversibility of his presence, which for us is being present without the present, for—different to Adorno—neither Levinas nor we encounter Chaplin in person but, rather, perceive him up there on the screen, in the way he, in the Here and Now, sharpens our view on Being, playing with a prop: a Being, for which Chaplin shows an escape, an escape from Being, in the way Levinas, too, attempts it. This escape may be the desire that distracts Chaplin from his

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brutal existence; it makes going out of Being possible, is conceived from the perspective of the Other (here, in an exemplary way, of the Other as the blind flower girl, played byVirginia Cherrill), is process, affectivity:63 Taking into consideration the camera, the film site, the lighting, and the sound, Chaplin constitutes the qualities of Being. He bears and generates affects; he creates an aesthetic effect and—by force of his body, by force of his expression, by force of things—participates in naked Being: “What shame discovers [découvre] is the being who uncovers himself [se découvre].”64 With Chaplin, the image makes access to naked Being possible. Through the image, actor and spectator take part in Being. Artistic praxis makes the comprehension of Being possible, participating in the ontological order.65 Let us point out: like the spectator or the observer, the artist is subjected to Being. The image refers to Being. In Levinas, therefore, it is not any expression of the artist.66 To be sure, the image leads the ego, even the ego of the artist, out of itself, though not “beyond the world toward the Other, but this side of the world toward Being, from where it comes.”67 Being skeptical vis-à-vis the image, where Being in the world dissolves, yet where the Other withdraws, conceived from the perspective of the Other: “The Ego is infinitely responsible in face of the Other. The Other who incites this ethical movement of consciousness, who deregulates the good conscience of the coincidence of Same with self, includes a surplus that is adequate to intentionality.”68 We recall: subsequent to his meeting Chaplin, Adorno grasps Chaplin’s capacities for miming as having quick presence of mind, as being ever-present, which are able to liberate from the burden of Being-One’s-self (Man-selbst-Sein) in the final, utopian analysis that transforms everything. Decades earlier, this capability of Chaplin had already touched Adorno, and he thematizes it accordingly in a Frankfurter Zeitung article, from May 1930, titled “Prophesied by Kierkegaard” (“Prophezeit von Kierkegaard”).69 Doing so, he relates an early piece by Søren Kierkegaard, in which the Danish philosopher writes about the comedian Friedrich Beckmann in the Königstädter Theater in Berlin, in 1841: “He is not only able to walk, but he is also able to come walking. To come walking is something very distinctive, and by means of this genius he also improvises the whole scenic setting. He is able not only to portray an itinerant craftsman; he is also able to come walking like one and in such a way that one experiences everything, surveys the smiling hamlet from the dusty highway, hears its quiet noise, sees the footpath that goes down by the village pond when one turns off there by the blacksmith’s—where one sees [Beckmann] walking along with his little bundle on his back, his stick in his hand, untroubled and undaunted.”70 Kierkegaard thematizes Beckmann in recourse to farce, in playing with exaggerations, mix-ups, and typecasts, where the spectator is required to act, to become active themselves: in the abstract absolute, in the vastness of

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abstractions, yet palpably real, the actor turns into the coincidental concretization of a “craftsman” or of a “clown” in general.71 The independent activity of the spectator consists of fathoming this dissimulation by the actor, starting with the spectator’s own principles, interests, and lived experiences, imagining. It has to do with answering the question of what the “clown” means to say, what it would signify if, in view of his farce, one ought to be put in a melancholy mood or beside oneself from laughing. While it is happening, according to Kierkegaard, any general aesthetic determination will fail, because the impact on the spectator’s independent activity, on their productivity, is based on their ethical power of judgment (Urteilskraft). In repeating their visit to the theatre, the observer is sated, affirms their self in the renewed assessment. According to Kierkegaard, the aesthetic in humanity is that whereby they are immediately what they are. The ethical is that whereby they become what they become. Kierkegaard understands the aesthetic life in opposition to the ethical life: opposed to any letting-oneself-go in some moody state of limbo, in the enjoyable observation of self, is independent activity, independent choice, in apprehending reality, in being connected to the self and in constituting freedom, as directed by the problem of existence: “One sticks one’s finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger into existence—it smells of nothing. Where am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean? Who is it that has lured me into the thing, and now leaves me there? Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs but was thrust into its ranks as though I had been bought of a ‘soul-seller’? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it?”72 In apprehending reality, already in the example of Beckmann, Kierkegaard’s theory of existence shows his Either/Or to be a leap from the aesthetic to the ethical stage.73 Thus, according to Adorno, as prophesied by Kierkegaard, Chaplin is also someone who “comes walking,” who simultaneously improvises all the scenic surroundings as well, who does not just present a clown but instead comes walking like one who “brushes against the world like a slow meteor even where he seems to be at rest; the imaginary landscape that he brings along is the meteor’s aura, which gathers here in the quiet noise of the village into transparent peace, while he strolls on with the cane and hat that so become him.”74 Chaplin acts in a snapshot that already includes a prior instance, something past, already also conceiving an advance moment, something future. Along with Kierkegaard, he is one who exists, who thinks in the moment, in the past, present, and future. Thus, playing with participial constructions, he not only walks through the landscape but is also simultaneously revealed as one who comes walking and one who comes having walked.75

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The Chaplin moving in the image before Adorno’s eyes portrays mimetic stimuli and animates the observer Adorno to move also.76 Adorno situates forms of subjective experience—those of Chaplin and his own—amongst nature, art, and artist, which are disposed to one another in an active/passive assimilation, whereby mimesis fabricates connections and the artist renders things visible, in the form of subjective experience as well, prepredicatively and ontogenetically, as yet not designating, not identifying, in the fabrication of similarities. Chaplin subjectively shows ways of conduct, which goes in advance of symbolic formations. He condenses moments, making Adorno’s ego, its foundations, shake in an aesthetic quake. In this regard, Chaplin is filmic.77 Adorno is apprehended in this snapshot of Chaplin, which is corporeal sensation, tinged by the body’s traces, and it is important to emphasize that there is only sensation where what is sensed is already a trace that is present in what is corporeal; it has somatic sides in which Chaplin’s mimesis acts as a corrective, where he as an actor pushes in between and makes claims on his opposite. In the process, his most important characteristic as an actor, and also for Adorno, is rhythm. Chaplin shows more than he acts. A glance of his eye, minimal movements of his limbs, and slight alterations of his stance are enough for him to have Adorno understand immediately what it is about. Adorno’s immediate impulse, his reaction going even here into the corporeal, and the conduct Chaplin shows in the image, his precise gift of gestures is in a tense relationship that can be situated between idiosyncratic reaction and post-facto reflection. Always with concern for taking the situation itself more precisely into view, so as to consolidate the materiality of human existence as visualized, to integrate corporeality in that visual, in corporeality’s intertwining of portraying and what is to be portrayed, to be able to elaborate its asymmetric character. In the pathos of the actor, then, we are subjected to a claim that is removed from our control, one that is able to exceed our possibilities. We do not respond to something but, rather, only in responding does what affects us come to light as such. We and the Other, the Particular and the Alien, come out of this intermediate happening—an occurrence that cannot be grasped either in any schematic of stimulus and response or in the notion of cause and effect, for the effect comes in advance of the cause and refers to a gap in the impossible as soon as it exceeds its own possibilities. Bernhard Waldenfels describes this process with the expression “diastasis,” which literally means “standing apart,” “stepping apart,” and refers to a process of differentiating, in which what is distinguished only then emerges. Experience is shifted vis-à-vis itself “in the form of a precedence of that which affects us and of a subsequence of that with which we respond to it.”78 In this process, mimesis as mimetic difference takes on the form of a diastasis. Something happens to the actor, too. Pathic, nonmimetic stimuli push into the foreground. The

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actor is not only a player but also a patient. Every one of his actions bears traits of an alien action. It begins somewhere else, with that which attracts or repels them, sets his acting in motion. “The mimetic difference between what is to be portrayed and what is portraying does not lie in itself; it points beyond itself. What pushes toward portrayal and does not already belong to any repertoire of portrayals in a certain way cannot be portrayed.”79 What cannot be portrayed is in what can be portrayed. What cannot be portrayed is that which affects the one who portrays as well as what they respond to with their art of portraying. In diastasis, that is, in extending mimetic difference to the breaking point, pathos—as that which befalls us—and the response—as that which comes from ourselves—diverge. In and with optic and acoustic phenomena, too, what is seen and what is heard are not simply in the world but, rather, possess an eventfulness (Ereignishaftigkeit). They arise in their becoming both visible and audible, which (co)organize the experiences. Here, too, alienness touches the senses; the room for our own potential to play is claimed, from outside of our sphere of peculiar ownness; an Other appears and demands an answer. In the pathos of the actors we stand both with and through them in deviations from what is expected, in which something hits or befalls us, something apprehends us or makes us shudder, something is done to us. From here, aisthetic and ethical dimensions of the performative unfold on the levels of seeing, hearing, and touching, on levels of the senses. These pose initial questions about the manner and way of our lives and about the claims awaiting us and their consequences: in snippets of life with Charlie Chaplin at a party on the coast of Malibu or from a seat in the movie theatre, with him at another party visualized in City Lights, or with Friedrich Beckmann on and before the stage of the Königstädter Theater on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz.

Chapter 3

Prosthethics

For its front cover, the Turkish edition of Théophile Gautier’s novella Avatar—having first been published in French in 1856—shows a copy of a linocut by the German artist Heinrich Hoerle. The image emerged around the middle of the 1920s as the so-called Prothesenkopf (Prosthetic Head), in which the human head has been replaced by an artificial one.1 Pictured from the side profile, the depiction appears as in a human portrait, in terms of perspective, though it is presented as a purely mechanical, metallic, and in fact electronic skull, as suggested by visible wiring in the artificial mouth, neck, and head. Only the outlines of what is human convey any idea that there is something no longer exclusively human involved here, something human that has been replaced with the help of prostheses, which take the place of parts of the body, its appendages, or organs. Whereas these outlines are visualized in Hoerle in relating to parts of the body, Gautier textualizes them in relating them to the entire body, which has been completely swapped out: as the result of a healer, Gautier’s gravely ill protagonist, Octave de Saville, acquires the potential to slip into the body of another person, ensuring him as an avatar not only his well-being but also the affection of a hitherto unattainable love interest. By way of their artistic work on these themes, both Hoerle and Gautier make it possible to reflect on a kind of prosthethics, resulting from a prosthetic, because they open our view to what can and cannot be replaced or exchanged. 3.1 REPLACING The process of gradually replacing unfolds like one of experiencing conflict that extends via the body. As in During the Weimar Republic, many of Hoerle’s images are especially concerned with the injuries of the victims both of the First World War, which had just come to an end, and of advancing industrialization. Here, too, his image of the prosthetic head comes to 37

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terms with violence suffered, from which the need arises to replace with a prosthesis that which was injured or maimed, and then cut off, so as to keep on living, though also to be able to continue working. Even if the prosthetic head is in this regard more a robotic phantasm for a head replaced with technology—and thus for human thought, too—it belongs in the series of body parts that no longer (are able to) belong to that body, and which signify loss and lack. Loss: I become headless. Lack: I am missing my head. How will I be able to perceive, think, and act? What do I suffer from what and how? Am I going to be replaced by a machine? What does this techno-logical development confront me with? In the case of Hoerle, this machine is a real instantiation of the war and of capitalism. The technization of life encroaches upon the body, interferes in it; mechanization harms it, injures and maims it. This technization, though, is one made and accordingly instrumentalized by humanity; it is employed by people against people and visualized by Hoerle, especially in his twelve lithographs about “cripples” in his so-called “Krüppelmappe”2 (from 1919)—a “passionate protest against the bestiality of war, against the bottom line of the excitement and promise of 1914: cripples. the madness that there are people who are reduced by one third or one half, who live on in an indifferent world—drawn quickly, the pathologically feverish distortions of crippled existence and their individual manifestations are brought onto these virtuoso pages,” as Hans Faber describes it in the organ der gruppe progressiver künstler, a bis z (organ of the progressive artists’ group, a to z), written by Hoerle.3 The same is true for his images titled Krüppel bettelnd4 (Cripples Begging, from 1921) and Denkmal der unbekannten Prothesen5 (Memorial of the Unknown Prostheses, from 1930), each of which is accompanied by a prosthetic head, and in which he renders visible what is already visible on the streets: people who lost parts of their bodies in the war, who were injured, to whom armed violence was done, by other people.6 The people who, for example, can no longer grab something with their hands on their own, because they are missing hands, mutilated by a hand grenade, or who can no longer walk on their own with both legs, because one of the two is missing, mutilated by a misstep onto a landmine. These images by Hoerle—as well as, for instance, Otto Dix and his painting Kriegskrüppel (War Cripples, from 1920)—show what was already replaced with prostheses, that is, the missing and thus invisible appendages, thus opening up a perspective for suffering. They confront us with questions that are indispensable for understanding the violent nature of all violent occurrences.7 In this regard, Pascal Delhom writes: “For carrying out violence only differs as such from other kinds of action as a result of being directed against and injuring living beings, such that it therefore aims to make them suffer.”8 The moment of carrying out violence, which in this case is being

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observed decidedly in a context of action, includes the assumption that even this action, namely, the violent occurrence, is entangled in that which preceded it and in that which extends above and beyond it. Violence aims at the visage of the other person; at their annihilation, both in physical as well as in its unassailable regard; and, in breaching alterity, at their transcendence. Levinas develops it as follows: “Corporeity is the mode of existence of a being whose presence is postponed at the very moment of his presence. Such a distension in the tension of the instant can only come from an infinite dimension which separates me from the other, both present and still to come, a dimension opened by the face of the Other. War can be produced only when a being postponing its death is exposed to violence. It can be produced only where discourse was possible: discourse subtends war itself. Moreover violence does not aim simply at disposing of the other as one disposes of a thing, but, already at the limit of murder, it proceeds from unlimited negation. It can aim at only a presence itself infinite despite its insertion in the field of my powers. Violence can aim only at a face.”9 As visualized by Hoerle, the war-injured had already suffered the loss of a body part, in an occurrence of war that concerns them and other persons, which, like any use of violence, can be traced back to people. “There is no violence without the people who carry it out, or who allow it to be suffered. And if we do not ascribe a certain occurrence to any person, though experience it as violence, that is because we ascribe it to another entity, to a god or fate personified, which we take to be the intentional originator. Neither the injurious attack of an animal—which was not trained by a person for this purpose—nor a natural catastrophe is experienced as a form of violence.”10 Violence depends on people. It is part of our humanity.11 This quality applies as well to all its uses that are described structurally or symbolically with concepts, for even these occurrences are not simply natural phenomena or do not follow defined, causal laws of nature. Rather, they are violent only because they are anthropogenic—namely, because, as natural events, they and their effects are controlled or could have been avoided by people, or because their production and reproduction within social processes and structures are the responsibility of human beings. “Phenomena of violence presuppose therefore an entity as their cause, which is able to act intentionally and for this reason can be taken to be violent.”12 This entity is human and cannot be replaced in any phenomenology of violence suffered understood as such, for this human agency has a responsibility, the more so as an effect is assigned to the violence, an impact that extends to other living beings who are injured. “For a living being lives not only in the world but also has on its own a relation to the world and to other living beings in the world. As a subject in this relation to the world, it senses stimuli, perceives objects, moves independently, and enters into relationships. In this process, it portrays in each case the starting

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point and the centre of its relation to the world and to Others. This relation constitutes its life.”13 At this juncture, Delhom clarifies not only the fact that an injury damages this being’s body and its psychic composition, but also the fact that the injury has consequences that impair its sensations, movements, and relationships. “[The injury] affects it in its relation to the world and to other living beings. What is specific to the injury consists of this connection between damaging body and psyche and impairing sensations, movements, and relationships. Only a living being that intrinsically has a relation to the world can be injured.”14 Delhom emphasizes that precisely what is affected by a violent occurrence defines this “intrinsically,” this relation to the world, and can also be described as freedom or spontaneity. “On the one hand, what is intrinsic is the only thing that violence, as an intentional action, can be directed against. For it is distinguished from all other objects as a result of being removed from the intentionality of the agent and, consequently, disrupts their privileged position at the origin and in the centre of their world. It can only be honoured or combatted. It provokes either acknowledgement or violence. On the other hand, there would also be no violence, if that which it is directed against would be entirely unattainable.”15 For violence touches and impairs living beings in their relation to themselves, the world, and Others. It injures them by damaging their body and their psychic make-up. On this subject, Delhom cites Levinas: “Violence bears upon only a being both graspable and escaping every hold. Without this living contradiction in the being that undergoes violence the deployment of violent force would reduce itself to a labor.”16 Violence is not only carried out, however, but is also suffered and is thus first and foremost an event that befalls us and is not any action or effect of a structure dependent on humanity. “The living being affected lives the experience as the reversal of their relation to the world: they do not turn towards the world on their own but, instead, are affected by something in the world, to which they are subjected. To be sure, they are the subject of their suffering, though not the subject in the sense of the originator of an intentional act but, rather, in such a way that they are sub-jected (i.e., thrown under) what injures them. The subject of suffering is the subjective pole of an occurrence that befalls them and which they cannot escape. They do not constitute an object but are instead affected.”17 It is precisely this suffering that makes up the violent nature of violence, which happens in being related from both sides, from that of suffering and from that of carrying it out or letting it occur. “Carrying out violence, like other kinds of action, can ensue as the means to a certain purpose; it can occur as the expression of hate, rage, or panicked angst; it can be employed as a demonstration of power; and much, much more. Yet the violent nature of this means, this expression, or this demonstration consists in each case of the fact that each is or can be suffered.”18 However, the

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perspective of suffering, according to Delhom, cannot be equated with that of the victim of violence, for it can just as well be the perspective of witnesses to violence suffered, and “not infrequently, it [i.e., this perspective] is that of persons who carry out violence or let it occur and are therefore confronted with the suffering of this violence as a result of other violence. Conversely, victims are also able to observe the violence they suffer from the perspective of the deed, thereby understanding it and even justifying it.”19 The perspective of suffering is therefore not necessarily that of the one who suffers. Yet it makes possible an observation of the entire violent occurrence, starting with what makes up its violent nature.20 With his phenomenological approach, what matters to Delhom here is the attempt to displace the focus onto suffering that proceeds with a conceptual framework, one that creates a kind of aesthesia for clarifying the violent nature of violence, which also means making it clear that suffering itself is not an experience: “The subject of injury does not constitute this as their object but is instead affected by it. Thus, an injury—insofar as it is suffered—is not a phenomenon. Moreover, it damages or destroys the corporeal or psychic basis of experience and movement in the world. For the ones who suffer, then, what is suffered cannot be easily thematized as what is suffered. Conversely, for the others involved in or witnesses to the occurrence of violence, there is always the danger that they overlook what is specifically violent to suffering or that they observe the occurrence of violence exclusively from the perspective of the deed.”21 To be able to consider the violent nature of violence as the object of a phenomenology, however—and not, in fact, as either a merely immutable experience that is only suffered and not experienced, or as a fully constituted experience that loses sight of the suffering—Delhom proposes looking for a point of access that takes up suffering as a limit of experience, one that occupies a perspective of suffering that distinguishes between a violence that intrudes and one that excludes: “Both kinds of violence are suffered as such; both affect and injure living beings in the relationship to the space where they live: in the first case, through the invasion by an alien body that cannot be integrated and, in the second case, through the exclusion from their own living space. The intrusion occurs from outside to inside as an injury to integrity; the exclusion from inside to outside as a denial of belonging or integration. What is true for both is that they injure.”22 What is also true for both is that I observe them from the viewpoint of my body, from the space where I live, which I can never leave, and from which I observe the world as an external world of objects, as well as from which I suffer physical violence as an intrusion.

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3.2 SWAPPING OUT “Octavius de Saville was slowly dying of a mysterious disease, which baffled every one. He was not bedridden; he led his usual life; nor did a complaint ever escape him, but he was visibly wasting away. To the inquiries of the physicians whom his anxious relatives and friends insisted upon his consulting, he answered that he felt no particular pain, and the medical men failed to discover in him any alarming symptoms. The auscultation of his chest resulted in a satisfactory sound, and scarce could a too slow or too rapid beating of the heart be noted when the ear was applied to that organ. He did not cough, he had no fever, yet life was leaving him through one of the numerous leaks of which, according to Terentius, the human frame is full. Sometimes a strange syncope would make him turn pale and cold as marble. For a moment or two he looked like a dead man, then the pendulum, released by the mysterious finger that had held it back, resumed its swing, and Octavius seemed to awake as out of a dream.”23 Gautier opens his phantastical novel Avatar with a report about the illness of its main character Octavius; nobody seems to know what this sickness consists of exactly. In the beginning, it abides in a realm of uncertainty, as Gautier describes it, echoing the Roman playwright Terence, who speaks of “the numerous [and: imperceptible] leaks of . . . the human frame,” which for him is one of the things that can be affected by the unhappiness of the Other: “I am a man, I hold that what affects another man affects me.”24 Terence puts this pronouncement in the mouth of the man who punishes himself, based on a lost comedy by the Greek poet Menander: the self-tormentor Menedemus, who prefers working in the fields alone, without the help of servants he could afford. Doing so, he points to the condition that for him everything human is related and therefore concerns him, too, standing for a human position that includes goodness, lenience, and deference.25 Corollary to being human: thoughtfulness needs to be practiced. The Delphic maxim “Know thyself!” also calls for being thoughtful about the fact that being human means being mortal, lending expression to being imperfect and limited, as in the case of Plato in the dialogue between Charmides and Socrates: Now, I want to know, what is that which is not wisdom, and of which wisdom is the science? You are just falling into the old error, Socrates, he said. You come asking wherein wisdom or temperance differs from the other sciences, and then you try to discover some respect in which it is like them. But it is not, for all the other sciences are of something else, and not of themselves. Wisdom alone is a science of other sciences and of itself. And of this, as I believe, you are very well

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aware, and you are only doing what you denied that you were doing just now, trying to refute me, instead of pursuing the argument. And what if I am? How can you think that I have any other motive in refuting you but what I should have in examining into my self? This motive would be just a fear of my unconsciously fancying that I knew something of which I was ignorant. And at this moment, I assure you, I pursue the argument chiefly for my own sake, and perhaps in some degree also for the sake of my other friends. For would you not say that the discovery of things as they truly are is a good common to all mankind? Yes, certainly, Socrates, he said.26

Thoughtfulness in this dialogue. The uncertainty of coming to know the self belongs to the drama of each and every body that is played out for it in the Here, Now, and Thus—as circumscribed by Gautier with concepts like ambivalence, peculiarity, or mystery. Octavius is his subjective body, which he has as an objective body. And he is his suffering, which he has as an illness.27 Hence, following this main character with Gautier’s help also means following him in his disturbed relationship to the world, to Others, and to himself. In this way the experience of Octavius’s own body is revealed, his way of existing, which is ambiguous. For—to add to and paraphrase Merleau-Ponty in this regard—thinking of Octavius as a bunch of third-person processes, by way of seeing, motor functions, and sexuality, for instance, then we notice that these processes cannot be linked to one another and with the external world by causal relations but, rather, “they are all obscurely drawn together and mutually implied in a unique drama. Therefore the body is not an object. For the same reason, my awareness of it is not a thought, that is to say, I cannot take it to pieces and reform it to make a clear idea.”28 This ambiguity of the body, its double existence, prevents Octavius, his doctors and relatives from knowing more about it other than that there is no other way leading to knowledge of it than the lived experience of his body, “which means taking up on my own account the drama which is being played out in it, and losing myself in it.”29 In this way Octavius is, to be sure, himself his body, at least to the extent that he calls any attainment his own and, vice versa, his body is like a natural subject, like a preliminary design of his Being as a whole. “Thus experience of one’s own body runs counter to the reflective procedure which detaches subject and object from each other, and which gives us only the thought about the body, or the body as an idea, and not the experience of the body or the body in reality.”30 Here, Merleau-Ponty points out the ambiguity of the manner of existing in the experience of one’s own body, which is separated from the Cartesian tradition, in which the manner of existing makes sense only in two different ways, namely, in existence as a thing and in existence as consciousness. The object is an object through and through;

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consciousness is consciousness through and through; the body is a sum of parts without any interior; the soul is Being present to its self without distance. Yet it is precisely here that Gautier subsequently begins, for Octavius attempts to depart from the drama of his body, seeking to leave his sick body as a sum of parts without any interior, and taking his soul along with him as Being present to its self without any distance. Gautier raises the phantasm of the transmigration of souls, which means for Octavius a way out of his existence defined by illness, though it also denotes an unconstrained devotion to someone Other, to a love interest who was unattainable in his previous, impaired body: Countess Prascovia Labinska, who is married to Count Olaf Labinski. Through a swap brought about in the text, Octavius achieves two things: the departure from his body, which suffers from illness though also from or perhaps even as a result of yearning, as well as the possibility of unconstrained devotion to the countess: with the help of the physician Balthasar Cherbonneau, Octavius succeeds in swapping his soul out with the count and, from then on, animates the objective body of the count. “Standing between the two inert bodies, Dr. Balthazar Cherbonneau, in his white robes, looked like a priest of one of those sanguinary creeds that cast the bodies of men on the altars of their gods. He recalled the priest of Vitziliputzili, the grim Mexican idol, of which Heinrich Heine speaks in one of his ballads, but his intentions were assuredly more peaceable. He drew near Count Olaf Labinski, who remained motionless, and uttered the inerrable syllable, which he then rapidly proceeded to repeat over Octavius, who was in a sound sleep. The ordinarily eccentric figure of Dr. Cherbonneau; was at this moment singularly majestic; the sense of the mighty power at his command ennobled his jumbled features, and had any one seen him performing these rites with sacerdotal gravity, he would not have recognized in him the Hoffmannic physician who challenged, though at the same time he defied, the caricaturist’s pencil. Strange things then occurred: Octavius de Saville and Count Olaf Labinski seemed to feel simultaneously the throes of the dying, their faces were greatly altered, a light froth rose to their lips, the pallor of death overlaid their complexion, while two little bluish, trembling points of light sparkled uncertainly above their heads. In response to a commanding gesture of the doctor’s, who seemed to indicate the road they were to follow through the air, the two luminous points moved on, leaving behind them a wake of light, and proceeded to their new homes. The soul of Octavius entered the body of Count Labinski; that of Count Olaf penetrated into that of Octavius; the avatar was accomplished.”31 From then on, Octavius lives with his soul in the body of an Other, granting him access to another world that does not belong to him, in which he can meet his beloved, since he is now simultaneously her spouse. Gautier has Octavius’s soul descend into the count’s body, completing a sacred descent

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that refers to the literal meaning of the term “avatar.” As it derives from Sanskrit, in the Indian religions the concept refers to the embodiment of a god on earth, to Vishnu in particular, as becomes clear in an early passage in the novel, involving the doctor’s workplace: “Along the walls hung miniatures in watercolours, the work of some Calcutta or Lucknow artist, representing the nine avatars through which Vishnu has already passed, the fish, the tortoise, the pig, the human-headed lion, the Brahmin dwarf, the Rama, the hero fighting with the many-armed giant Cartasuciriargunen, the Kitona, the miraculous child, in which some recognise a Hindoo Christ; the Bouddha, worshipping the great god Mahadevi, and, finally, asleep in the centre of the Milky Sea, upon the cobra with its five heads curving up over him in the form of a dais, waiting until it is time to assume, as a last incarnation, the form of the winged pale horse, which, striking the earth with its hoof, is to cause the end of the world.”32 The avatar was achieved, the transmigration of souls complete. In Hinduism, the avatar is understood to be only a shell or a vessel, and no swapping out takes place between the godhead and the figure of an animal or a human being; instead, the divinity in the animal or human being takes on shape after descending into it. Yet in Gautier the swapping out is completed in the phantasm of the transmigration of souls, which proves to be a fallacy, however, as the following scene shows: “The breakfast ended in silence, for Prascovia was annoyed with him she took for her husband. As for Octavius, he was in torment, fearing other questions to which he would be unable to make any reply. The meal over, the Countess rose and returned to her apartments. Octavius, left alone, played with the handle of a knife which he felt like driving into his heart, so intolerable was his position. He had reckoned on surprising the Countess, and instead he found himself involved in the closed maze of a life he knew nothing of. When he had assumed the body of Count Olaf Labinski, he now felt he ought to have also robbed him of his thoughts, of the languages he knew, of his remembrances of childhood, of the innumerable secret matters that go to the making of a man’s ego, which are the bonds that connect his existence with that of others. But to do this even the marvellous learning of Dr. Balthazar Cherbonneau would have proved insufficient. It was maddening.”33 The suffering of Octavius continues even as an avatar, for, via the topical nature of his other body, he is unable to fall back on that which makes up this other body (or even the body of his own he left behind): the habitual character, knowledge, linguistic proficiencies, memories—those hidden particulars Gautier described that make up the ego of a person, those relationships connecting one life to the lives of Others.34 In these passages, Gautier’s prose invites us to comprehend Octavius’s “avatarization”—which has been initiated by suffering and is compelled by way of yearning or idealized images—as an idea, from which the corporeal

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basis is gradually removed. For in the end, nothing more remains for the avatar Octavius to say, for he is admittedly unable to fall back on any experience that precedes his present. His present remains devoid of sense; he cannot respond to it. From this position, it is only a small step to observe the avatar in the text not just by way of a phantasm, a fiction, or something imaginary, but also by way of mediality and visual imagery, by algorithmization and digitalization. Doing so is to put forward the idea that the avatar indeed opens up latitude for its own and for alien possibilities between image and observer in a presence without present—there in the image with its telepresence, onscreen, whether controllable or not—where meanings are able to shift. Even so, it is certainly nothing more than a spiritualization of our world in the so-called cyberspace, a spiritualization which, as a result of its dematerialization, does indeed increase visibility yet does not resolve the puzzle of invisibility, loses any intercorporeality, and thus cannot render the above-mentioned hidden particulars visible. For, as Käte Meyer-Drawe points out, “[W]e will not discover in digitalized bodies how people attain any meaningful world. Visible space is condensed. It does not leave any void behind in which a Cartesian pineal gland could function as a keeper of meaning.”35 Meyer-Drawe concurs with Merleau-Ponty: “Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not the contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework (membrure), and the in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible.”36 Accordingly, it remains puzzling, even if we assume, as does Michel Tibon-Cornillot, that an “intermediary” sphere appears to have unfolded, a “metareal seam in which the mechanical, the artificial takes its place vis-à-vis human producers who, for their part, recognize it as being far superior to the classic machine,” for the meaning “with which we fit out our world at its [i.e., this world’s] instigation”—as Meyer-Drawe puts it—“will not be revealed to us as a result of studying neural networks or decrypted by information models. To understand this meaning, we have to go back to the fact that we are simply not transparent people living in a transparent world.”37 Put another way, this aisthetics of existence will only be conceived as such when the corporeal self can be experienced as the site of an exposition vis-à-vis other people, in attaining intercorporeality, in presence with the present, when corporeality can be comprehended as the realization of what is human and, to be sure, as a realization and not as any “avatarization,” for only in this realization are our inevitable vulnerability and finality revealed. 3.3 ACTING IN PLACE OF “I will be a worker: this idea holds me back when mad anger drives me toward the battle of Paris—where so many workers are dying as I write to

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you! Work now?—never, never: I am on strike. Now, I’m degrading myself as much as possible. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a Seer: you will not understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but one has to be strong, one has to be born a poet, and I know that I am a poet. This is not all my fault. It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: people think me. Pardon the pun [lit.: word play]. I is someone else [lit.: an Other]. Too bad for the wood which finds itself a violin and Scorn for the heedless who argue over what they are completely missing!”38 Here only seventeen years old, Gautier’s contemporary Arthur Rimbaud is writing to his mentor Georges Izambard with the admission that he wants to be a poet, at a time in which the declaration of the French Republic and the proclamation of the Paris Commune were playing out within a few months of each other. In this regard, events are happening in rapid succession, and poetry is entering into a new relationship with its surroundings. As Tim Trazaskalik points out, it has to put itself “into the service of the arrival of what is new in the public square.”39 In these attempts and searches, it is now a question of poetry having to make its contribution, in its own manner: “And if in this process it looks forward and leads the way, that is because it looks backward, because it possesses the second, the secondary gaze. It analyzes the traces of past usage and, in particular, the most recent past; more precisely: it traces several commonplace usages in matters of poetry.”40 Is it, then, about a duty poets have vis-à-vis society, which they make to appear objective in their poetic writings? If that is the case, then it is only as a result of defending poetic license, which leads to admittedly dutiful poetry, yet at the same time to paths that can open to a kind of criticism in order to sound out possibilities for a new, different, and better social context. In this way, Rimbaud is thinking about a second gaze on things, which entails working on what is new, even if it does not lead to any political action. In that regard, of course, Rimbaud is far from being a worker—as he makes clear at the beginning of his letter to Izambard, whom he addresses as a burgher (le citoyen)—for as long as Izambard’s bourgeois society still exists, then working always means prostitution, too, with the exception of the street fighting in Paris on May 13, 1871, as an immediate political action. That is why Rimbaud is on strike and means to take up work again only under completely altered conditions. What is at stake in this unrest, how can poets orient themselves to it, how can they at all still be poets and become seers, that is, attain insight and second sight alike? In attempting to answer these questions, Rimbaud takes two premises as his point of departure in his letter to Izambard, both of which have to do directly with his praxis: “It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: people think me. Pardon the pun [lit.: word play]. I is someone else [lit.:

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an Other].”41 The ego does not think itself on its own; it is thought, thought by the people of Versailles, in fact, the society Izambard stands for, whom he serves as a teacher. I is an Other, in the first place, in fact, on account of a socially instantiated alienation.42 Taken a step further, this sentence reveals Rimbaud’s program, for the ego is constituted as Other, different to a collective, to the society of Versailles, which the ego is breaking away from. Which does not mean, however, that the poet is only thinking about a simple difference between the “one,” the unitary subject as formed by society, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the “I” as it collectively stands for an upcoming unitary subject as formed in a new society. Rather, the poet goes above and beyond that subject, in which this ego refuses to be coopted by any collective at all. It is precisely in this refusal that it is constituted as a subject in the very first place, which can then work on creating a subject in the Commune.43 The poet produces the Commune, which stands in relationship to the revolt that is produced by the ego, and which subsequently becomes an historical event that in turn affects the ego, the poet, who is obliged to take a position. “It is about a dialectical process: the more particular the ego is, the more it is concerned with its particularity and its exclusion, so then its actions will be of even more general interest.”44 If “I am an Other,” then “I” as an Other am still “I.” “I” relates to me as myself and to me as an Other. I am in an alterity relationship to me and Others, for my ego depends constitutively, in a way that cannot be sublated, on what is external. My “ego” is not master in its own house, though that also implies the possibility that a new “ego” can be formed, in undiscovered, unknown directions, which can also portend freedom. Put another way, this process also means that “I” do not result from my consciousness but, rather, from acting in place of the Other. Even so, this movement does not address any phenomenon of swapping out, for I cannot take over the place of an Other, naturally, as in Gautier’s phantasm and its ensuing images. Instead—especially in the thought of Levinas—it is more about the fact that I am the substitute for the Other, because I am responsible for the Other, for their alterity takes possession of me; I am confronted with it as a hostage, which endows a kind of inwardness, with which I come to an unavoidable receptivity for the Other: “Inwardness is not at all like a way of disposing of private matters. This inwardness without secrets is a pure witness to the inordinateness which already commands me, to give to the other taking the bread out of my own mouth, and making a gift of my own skin.”45 Here, for Levinas, it is about thinking a responsibility that is attested to for the Other in a way that is preprimordial, prior to what is original, from out of a radical passivity; it precedes any free commitment, even before it can be described by its incapability to appear in what has been said.

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As preoriginal susceptibility, this passivity is older than the origin and is challenged in the subject, yet without this challenge having ever possibly become a present or a logos. “Through this susceptibility the subject is responsible for his responsibility, unable to escape from it without keeping a trace of his desertion. It is responsibility before being intentionality.”46 In this way, moreover, for Levinas it is about thinking of a nonindifference in which the one who is uniquely responsible is set free in speaking, in responsibility, and in approaching: my self. “In the non-indifference to a neighbor, where proximity is never close enough, the difference between me and the other, and the undeclinability of the subject are not effaced, as they are in the situation in which the relationship of the one with the other is understood to be reciprocal. The non-indifference to the other as other and as neighbor in which I exist is something beyond any commitment in the voluntary sense of the term, for it extends into my very bearing as an entity, to the point of substitution. It is at the same time prior to commitments, for it disengages in this extreme passivity an undeclinable and unique subject. Responsibility, the signification which is non-indifference, goes one way, from me to the other.”47 The way I appear is a summons. I am put in the passivity of an undeclinable assignation, in the accusative, a self. Not as a particular case of the universal, an ego belonging to the concept of ego, said in the first person-I, unique in my genus.48 Here, Levinas does not suppose any ego that is based on a unique trait of its nature or of its character, for nothing is unique, except for the responsibility in whose conceptual significance I am set free and put forward, as a substitute, as someone who is uniquely responsible.

Chapter 4

Face, Mask, and Visage

Face, mask, and visage constitute three modes of appearance for the individual and their form, while at the same time they describe modes of visual imagery: the image as a “surface” that puts itself on display and reveals something visible; the image as “faciality,” as already etymologically indicated in obraz, the word for image in Slavic languages; as well as the image as something “looking back,” something “envisaged” or “auratic,” which bears upon our gaze, addresses and links it. We are dealing with modifications of a sort of “aspect” that, on the one hand, affects what the look wants to see or seeks to recognize, as that view, on the other hand, comes toward it, chains and positions it. At the same time, we are confronted with different modifications of “illusion” and “dis-illusion,” as has been ascribed to the image since forever—as something that postures and conceals as well as reveals and manifests. In addition, these three modes can be read as reciprocal relations, as differential pairs, to which are deployed figures that are withdrawn step-by-step. For mask and face are disposed toward each other prima facie as oppositions, inasmuch as the mask does not show the face that is hiding behind it. In equal measure, face and visage constitute opposites, for the face might portray nothing other than a pose, a mask put on for public display, by which we as personae act out ourselves theatrically, whereas the “bareness” and “nudity” of the visage still shines through every face as a moment of its alterity and a “trace of transcendence” (as Levinas has expressed it). To this extent, all three concepts belong together and maintain a complex game of relations amongst one another, which can be transferred in equal measure to the image, too, to its “gazeability” as well as its opacity and transparency. 4.1 FACE AND MASK In his reflections about “impersonal identity,” Giorgio Agamben places the human desire to be recognized by others first and foremost for illustrating a 51

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reduction of each and every human being to their “naked life.” In line with Hegel, Agamben begins by putting forward this desire for recognition as essential for humanity, so essential in its significance that people will even put their lives at stake for it. “[For this] is not merely a question of satisfaction or self-love; rather, it is only through recognition by others that man can constitute himself as a person.”1 In Hegel, being-recognized is “unmediated actuality” (“unmittelbare Wirklichkeit”) and in its element the individual “first of all being-for-himself in general; working and enjoying” (“zuerst als Fürsich-sein überhaupt; sie ist genießend und arbeitend”); until then, every one serves “the Other” (“dem Anderen”).2 In Agamben, this being-recognized—which in Hegel appears as an interior desire, as a need—is realized as a general, spiritual Being, for the individual becomes a person only in the visual field of the Other, in recognition. Thus, originally in Latin persona also means “mask,” with which each and every individual acquires an identity and a social role, in a move toward a personality, in light of their legal capacity and their political worth as a free human being. “The struggle for recognition is, therefore, the struggle for a mask, but this mask coincides with the ‘personality’ that society recognizes in every individual (or with the ‘personage’ that it makes of the individual with, at times, reticent connivance).”3 Reaching back to the philosophy of the Stoics (Epictetus), Agamben constrains his considerations to the legal and political persona with reflections on the emergence of a moral persona, whom he puts in the theatre into the relationship of the actor to their mask: the actor is not permitted to choose or reject the role that the author has intended for them; he also may not identify with it completely. The moral individual, for Agamben, arises through “an adhesion to, and a distancing from, the social mask: he accepts it without reservation and, at the same time, almost imperceptible distances himself from it.”4 As an ambivalent gesture, this creates an ethical distance between human beings and their masks, as visualized in Roman frescoes and mosaics, which show actors’ silent dialogue with their masks. “The actor is depicted here either standing or sitting in front of his mask, which is held in his left hand or is placed on a pedestal.”5 This idealized stance and facial gesture of the actor, according to Agamben, attests to the special meaning of their relationship, for the actor directs his look at the mask’s empty eye sockets—a visual direction that changes with modernity, however, in the portraits from the commedia dell’arte, among others, for now the actor avoids looking at the mask they hold in their hand and thus increases the distance between the individual and the persona, especially, too, because their look falls momentarily onto the observer, speaking to them decisively and inquiringly. If the actor wears a mask, they conceal their facial expressions and intensify their physical gestures. Their face is covered and discloses that of a shape.

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The paradox of the mask: It shows by hiding. Face and mask indistinguishably become one, in moving the Greek prosopon from the artificial to the natural: the mask (prosopon) is the face (prosopon). What is different, mask/ face (prosopon/prosopon), can be swapped out.6 The face is what is visible and cannot be what is invisible. Taken a step further: in accordance with the literal sense of prosopon, the face is always what is opposite to the eyes of an Other. In Christian imagery, by contrast, around Year Zero the Latin persona defines Jesus Christ the human being, the individual wearing the mask of God in being human.7 His humanity can be seen in a face that can be seen and portrayed, one that refers at the same time to a divine nature that cannot be seen and portrayed, whose particular face only becomes visible, appears unconcealed, in paradise. Yet persona, borrowed from the Etruscan, comes from Persu, a god of the earth, in whose honor festivals with masked dancers were held, as Käte Meyer-Drawe points out.8 Since there is no corresponding term in Latin for the Greek prosopon, and since the essence of the individual is circumscribed in Greek by hypostasis, persona assumes the designation for the human interior, and person becomes the designation for the human interior as morally understood.9 This question about the relationship between mask, face, and personality, though, is only posed in the context of the early modern era. The medieval world was not aware of any faces. At that point, rather, the meaning of “face” (“Gesicht”) was closer to English “sight,” as in the German “zweites Gesicht” (literally: “second face”), signifying “second sight” in the sense of an intuition or hallucination. Much earlier, the older word antlitze was used instead; or gestures and body language were noted. Only with the birth of the individual did “face” (“Gesicht”) connect with the ability to recognize and identify. Then the identity of the individual appears linked to features that function like signs and make a semiotic configuration out of the face.10 From this point of departure, the “way of the masks” opens up a widely branching path via sedimented and handed-down institutions à la historicity: no mask (like a face or an image, as it were) stands for itself alone; it presupposes other real or potential masks and, even in rituals and death cults, it negates just as much as it affirms; it consists of what it excludes as well.11 The mask founds relationships between the ego and the Other, between life and death. It makes what is Other appear, as well as what is immaterial, spiritual, starting with the face of the person, going beyond it, coming before it, in the eyes of the Others. In his novel The Face of Another (1964), Kobo Abe writes: “Of course, according to one theory a mask is apparently the expression of an extremely metaphysical aspiration to give oneself a kind of transcendental disguise, for

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the mask is not simply something compensatory. Even I did not regard it as anything like a shirt or a pair of pants that I could change at will. However, I really don’t care about the ancients, who believed in idols, and about adolescents who imitate them, but for me, at this point it is probably useless to decorate the altars of my next life with masks. No matter how many faces I have, there is no changing the fact that I am me.”12 The face of the Other is the carrier of an existence “[just] as my own existence is carried by my body, that knowledge-acquiring apparatus,” since one’s own particular seeing manifests as the look riveted to the visible world—as Merleau-Ponty points out in his Phenomenology of Perception—in whose visual field there is the Other’s view, “that expressive instrument called a face.”13 I myself do not see my face; I am not even aware of it at first; for me, it is only accessible via roundabout routes I learn, with an initially astonished look into a lake that reflects or into a hotel mirror that was just polished. I learn to see: facies from Latin, face in French and in English, from the Latin facere, to do, which approximates the face as a visible shell or also as a façade. “For instance, I never realized how many faces there are. There are lots of people but still more faces, for everyone has several. There are people who wear a face for years, of course it wears out, gets dirty, cracks in the folds, stretches like a glove one has worn on a journey. Those are thrifty, simple people: they don’t change it, they don’t even have it cleaned. It’s good enough, they maintain, and who can convince them otherwise? The question does arise, since they have several faces, what do they do with the others? They keep them in reserve. Their children will get to wear them. But it also happens their dogs wear them when they go out. And why not? Face is face.”14 I am learning to see: in viewing, in looking, my own face is missing, just as with death, as it were; both elude me, the corporeality that is both particular and peculiar to me. To me, my own face is strangely external and is sublated, suspended in a peculiar way from my body, without which, in turn, I would not have any face. Our face, as Meyer-Drawe says, “means being seen and seeing in one. In it, our corporeal self and our sensory nature are condensed (‘verdichtet’) for the other.”15 In this way, Merleau-Ponty also begins with the standpoint of his own body as the field of perception and of action; he elaborates his own perception, proceeding from directly perceiving to thinking about perceiving, which is understood in a temporal moment, and which was always already there in his own subjective body, exactly as the other subjective body was always already there; I thus understand the Other in the same way I understand my own perception: in the Other, too, I find “only the trace of a consciousness which evades me in its actuality and, when my gaze meets another gaze, I re-enact the alien existence in a sort of reflection.”16 The phenomenologist attempts a deduction of the other consciousness, which is only made possible for them

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“only if the emotional expressions of others are compared and identified with mine, and precise correlations recognized between my physical behaviour and ‘psychic events.’”17 Perceiving the other presupposes these findings; they are only made possible as a result of it, for the face of the other is always already there. Accordingly, seeing a face does not mean “to conceive the idea of a certain law of constitution to which the object invariably conforms throughout all its possible orientations”; rather, it means “to take a certain hold upon it, to be able to follow upon its surface a certain perceptual route with its ups and downs, and one just as unrecognizable taken in reverse as the mountain up which I was so recently toiling, and down which I am now striding my way.”18 In this regard, finally, mask and face are distinguished: the latter is absorbed in the former no more than the former is covered by the latter. Instead, the face resists its semiotization, in which classical physiognomy similarly failed; meanwhile, the mask is always oriented toward exaggerated points, manifestly expressed and recognizable, therefore appearing to be related to symbols.19 For that reason, seeing a face denotes recognizing and not recognizing it simultaneously, for certain manifestations or moments will always come forth, whose alteration or deviation on occasion will keep me from recognizing the Other. Reversed, I open up in the very first place in the visual field of the other, make myself known in a way that is unrecognizable for me. That kind of revelation is a condition of my being acknowledged. Abe notes: “I’m sorry, but apparently you don’t really understand. The face, in the final analysis, is the expression. The expression—how shall I put it?—well, the expression is something like an equation by which we show our relationship with others. It’s a roadway between oneself and others, If it’s blocked by a landslide, even those who have been at pains to travel it will think you are now some uninhabited, dilapidated house and perhaps pass by.”20 It is only in the eye of the Other that I become an individual, to which from the very beginning an intersubjective dimension appertains, and which subjects seeing to ethics, as part of which I am also able to look, turn, and pull away from.21 4.2 VISAGE AND FACE Radicalizing this move, Levinas has made the “visage” of the Other into the point of departure for a withdrawal of both the face and of its transcendence, which reconstructs this ethics of gaze as an ethics of a kind of responsivity. In his investigations on phenomenology and social philosophy, Levinas makes his way along the trail of the other, human visage that speaks in an Other, to the extent that it first of all opens up the possibility of response and discourse: “This is what the formula ‘the face speaks’ expresses. The manifestation of

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a face is the first discourse. To speak is before all this way of coming from behind one’s appearance, behind one’s form—an opening in the openness.”22 Levinas uses the word “le visage,” whose translation allows for “face” and “visage” in equal measure, though in German the decision of the translator Klaus Krewani makes it clear that in every being-faced (“Gesichtigkeit”) an underdeveloped alterity remains, as a result of which it is made known at all. Etymologically, in German the word “Antlitz” derives from ant-, meaning “counter,” and litzen, lugen, or lita, for “looking,” “viewing.” Consequently, it is what is “looking opposite,” which likewise connotes the meanings of looks, shape, and appearance. The wording presupposes the recognition that the Other is manifested in the visage, and Levinas points out that the Other “breaks through his own plastic essence, like someone who opens a window on which his own figure is outlined.”23 Their presence consists of divesting of the form that manifests it all the same. In the interpersonal encounter, the Other is experienced as a result of their address to me. Of course, I see the Other, can touch them, shake their hand, even smell them, but in doing so I still experience them as an object and therefore, according to Levinas, not in their Otherness. This Otherness is expressed only when they speak to me with their voice: In the saying, not by way of what is said. “Saying is not a game. Antecedent to the verbal signs it conjugates, to the linguistic systems and semantic glimmerings, a foreword preceding languages, it is the proximity of the one to the other, the commitment of an approach, the one for the other, the very signifyingness of signification.”24 As part of addressing, the encounter with Others becomes a linguistic relationship, in which the Other does not remain a mere object that looks at me mutely but, rather, one that says something, speaks to me, eluding my capability and yet demanding a response. Doing so, the Other’s saying creates the moment of a linguistic relationship, which consists of my being spoken to, as You (Du), in the second-person singular. Responding to it can only be by me, in the first-person singular, whereupon any generalizing becomes impossible, for no one can respond for me in my place to the word of the Other. No, we can no longer speak of “an I” but only of “me” instead. Of course, I can ignore the address of the Other, fail to hear it, dismiss it, but the word of the Other remains and even my failing to hear it is a form of responding, even a form of violence, for doing so I attempt to silence the Other. If I should hear the word of the Other, however, react to it, then I recognize them, acknowledging that the Other is vulnerable, for they are subjected to my violence in that I fail to hear them, am able to silence them. However I respond, my response (“Antwort”) renders a responsibility (“Ver-Antwortung”) to the Other. “The epiphany of a face [Antlitz] is alive. Its life consists in undoing the form.”25 For Levinas, it involves the phenomenon (of the fact) that is the appearance of the Other, which is also the visage, and thus involves a phenomenology of

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the human countenance, in which the face is not any pure, optical given but, rather, something that is not at my disposal, that I am not able to grab hold of, because it counters me, because it was already there and consequently leaves a trace behind, a trace of the Other: with their visage, the Other is not only present in my field of experience but also expresses themselves vis-à-vis me, speaks to me from their transcendent position, is experienced as an Alien, and cannot be determined or influenced by me, because the Other and the Alien always already preempt me, because they have already left a trace behind. However, this trace does not mean—as Bernhard Waldenfels puts forward in his lectures on the phenomenology of the (subjective) body—that “everything is obvious, though it also does not mean that something is there in what is hidden, which I came to by way of intellectual considerations or reasoning by analogy. Rather, it means: there are indications of something that is present in its absence.”26 Waldenfels puts forth that we do not come to know a face “by registering individual, empirical data, so as to compose something from them, an X, a face”; instead, he says, the details of the face presuppose “a physiognomy, in which certain moments like facial expressions, liveliness, and ways of looking abruptly come to the fore.”27 The face is highlighted, stands out, demands, becomes an entity in whose perspective I move, I catch someone’s eye: in a broader sense, though, in a special way, the face is unapproachable and untouchable; whereas, in a more narrow sense it is understood as “something visible in the world, a shape with certain features that lead to this face being recognized again and thus identified.”28 In the broader sense, then, the face being unapproachable and untouchable also conveys, according to Levinas, that: “You shall not commit murder.”29 It is from the face of the Other that an ethical resistance originates; it breaches my capability; it is an extra above and beyond the inevitable hardening of the appearance; with it the limit of my capability is reached. My own options are called into question by the Other. Ethics is an optics. The appearance of the Other speaks to me in the seeing, in the perceiving. It is a visitation. Their visage is the visible surface of the face, as well as the imperative from which the existence of the Other speaks: the Other concerns me. They are vulnerable and mortal. Their visage is nude, since it is not clad in any kind of meaning but, rather, is only denoted as a result of its self. It intimates to me that I am responsible, whereas I cannot expect that they are just as responsible for me; that is their affair, and because of that our relationship proves to be an asymmetrical one as well. Because the other is violable and mortal, I am always already intervening, with my existence, in their existence, for I must, even without perhaps wanting it, respond to their vulnerability and mortality. I am responsible to them, I am responsible for them, not because we belong to the same species, not because we are human beings, not as a manner of a common identity that is carried out in a kind of constitutive performance of

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the consciousness, thus sublating the Otherness of the Other, degrading them to mere alter ego, a simple extension of my self. Rather, it is because the Other calls into question my consciousness, in the sense, too, of whether it does justice to their responsibility, as an unconditioned demand and orientation for my action, as an irrefutable sense of the nudity of the visage, whose demanding remains, even if I attempt to elude it. “Responsibility for the other, for what has not begun in me is responsibility in the innocence of being a hostage. [. . .] My substitution—it is as my own that substitution for the neighbor is produced.”30 No one can respond in my place and be responsible. I become disquieted and quieted at the same time: you could kill, and you will not kill. “The ‘thou shalt not murder’ is inscribed on the face and constitutes its very otherness. Speech, then, is a relationship between freedoms who neither limit nor deny one another, but reciprocally affirm one another. They are transcendent in relation to one another. Neither hostile nor friendly, all hostility, all affection would already change the pure vis-à-vis of the interlocutor. The term respect can be taken up again here; provided we emphasize that the reciprocity of this respect is not an indifferent relationship, such as a serene contemplation, and that it is not the result, but the condition of ethics. It is language, that is, responsibility. Respect attaches the just man to his associates in justice before attaching him to the man who demands justice.”31 From this ethical impossibility of killing them results an obligation to react to the Other, to assist them, to respect them and thus not to eliminate their Otherness by way of physical violence or concepts that grab hold. You may not kill me. Rather, I stand up for them, in an alteritary encounter that opens for the other, is open; it is one that puts itself as praxis into the world by way of my responsibility; one that hides within itself personal as well as political dimensions, for I do not remain alone with them but, rather, a third person must be considered, one who is always already present. In this way, whatever dialogue there is between you and me expands into a discussion with and amongst many, in a desire for justice, as part of which the transition from both of us to all of us, amongst us, with and amongst additional Others, makes up the origin of what is political. This origin is resituated by Levinas in transitioning from the Other to the third person, to the “He,” to the “ille” and illeity. As a consequence, this transition is also a transition into number and thus to what is countable, to what is calculable.32 For this moment, Werner Stegmaier puts forth that as soon as the ethical admits of this numbering, it can be calculated and, so doing, it differentiates what was until then “inter-individual, non-mediated, incalculable” obligation into a “general, mediated, calculable obligation”: “The third person transitions into the third party.”33 At this juncture, for Stegmaier, the conception of the political has been set up in Levinas. “As a result of merely counting, the transfer point from the ethical to the political has been simply and exactly marked out.”34

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Ever since Plato, Stegmaier notes, we have lost sight of this transfer point in traditional philosophy, because the contradistinction from the individual to the general has been taken as the point of departure and the general has been given priority, even though it is in fact Plato who in his dialogues incessantly demonstrates the transfer from the individual into the general: “In constantly having individuals confront what is general face-to-face, he visibly links the general to individuals, and whenever he changes the topic of discussion, he often changes the interlocutor, too.”35 In fact, it is in the figure of Socrates, Stegmaier says, that Plato moreover puts an individual center stage, who time and again maintains a surprising interaction with what is general, each time treating anew the idea from ideas. Stegmaier points out the sense of ideas in the particular, which as a third party make comparable what is given, what can be experienced, thus making them the case for what is general, for a rule. “Thus, in the behaviour of humans with one another, what is good was made good according to rules. That is to say, it was made into what is right, and in that regard the ethical became the political. In this way, a polis that is based on laws became thinkable.”36 In doing so, ideas do not remain fixed in what is specific. “Something is determined by way of them, though they themselves cannot be easily determined.” On the contrary, ideas are brought into play time and again, in alternating situations and with changing interlocutors: how that happens is an ethical question, which is why the idea of ideas must be an idea of what is good, of the good use of ideas. “Yet the good use of ideas is something good that is beyond essence, beyond what can be determined.”37 It is precisely this “good beyond essence” that Levinas philosophizes in conjunction with Plato, linking what can be regulated, calculated as good, right—the political—to what cannot be calculated as good—the ethical. It is not with Plato but with Platonism that the general occupies a place that is larger than the individual. Stegmaier makes clear that, as a result, Levinas avoids any kind of Platonism whatsoever, by introducing the third party explicitly in regard of the third person, the additional Other, who as a result of “their vital need obliges comparing and thus what is general.”38 In this way, the introduction of what is general becomes ethically obliging on its own out of a theoretical game, though at the same time keeping what is general in suspension and motion, for an additional Other can render requisite what is otherwise general. At this juncture, Dieter Mersch emphasizes the opposition of ethics and politics and points to something political, which is always “animated by ‘power,’ constraint, or control and attempts to provide a kind of human conditioning.” According to Mersch, the “ethics of the Other” exists as the prima philosophia and precedes every political intervention in an antecedent “renunciation of power” as immanent to the passibility of the “good.”39

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In contrast, Stegmaier elaborates a conception of the political in Levinas, the origin of which is number, not power. His conception does not raise the question of distributing or controlling power but, rather, the issue of transitioning from the individual to the general, from the good to the right, from the ethical to the political. As a consequence of this transitioning, Levinas speaks of what is just (la justice) as ethically linked to mercy (la miséricorde), from which justice originates, whereby justice may be different in every new situation in which I encounter a new need.40 In a discussion with Elisabeth Weber, Stegmaier cites Levinas: “In my thinking, there is a precisely defined sense of the political. It lies in the fact that there are not two but at least three of us. Immediately added to the initial mercy—for the relationship between two is one of mercy—come ‘calculation’ and comparison. In this multiplicity, every visage counts, and all visages negate themselves mutually. Everyone was chosen as if by way of God’s word; everyone has a right. And every visage denotes responsibility. As soon as there is a third person, I have to compare. The justice of comparing necessarily comes after mercy. It owes everything to mercy, though it constantly negates mercy. That is where the political lies.”41 That is also to say that the third person is always already there and not just added to the Other. What Stegmaier notes here in the transition from the ethical to the political is merely a change in the horizon. “We can see and determine something before the horizon, without the horizon itself possibly being seen or determined. The horizon is what for a limit is unlimited, cannot be delimited.”42 In this way, Levinas delimits the ethical and the political as not being delimitable from each other. Put another way: something ethical obliges in the immediacy of the relationship with the Other who addresses me, and something political emerges from modifying this responsibility in the presence of the third person. This assumption holds both for friend and for foe, which Judith Butler takes as her point of departure in critiquing Levinas. She argues for a politics in which the ethical responsibility for the Other also holds in situations of enmity, in which there is thus a “face of the enemy.” In the case of Levinas—who situates the particular responsibility of the divine commandment “Thou shalt not kill” from the Bible in Israel and Europe, and who thematizes its failure in both world wars and during the Shoah in Europe—Butler repeatedly contends that Palestinians have no face, that they are “faceless,” in his thinking. For this assertion, she submits a passage from an interview with Levinas, which she puts forward for her critique. In it, Levinas says that there is indeed no limit to my responsibility for the Others, though admittedly in the cases in which “your neighbour attacks another neighbour or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least then we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right

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and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong.”43 Pascal Delhom points out that in changing the character of alterity here, Levinas sees the ethical necessity of politics, in which neighbors are defended against those who attack them—a defense, however, that is not to be understood as self-defense because then it would not be justified.44 Butler, Delhom puts forth, is interpreting the passage in this Levinas interview in such a way that, according to Levinas, there is an ethical obligation to defend oneself and to defend the Others who are neighbors, and “that this ethical obligation rivals the unconstrained responsibility for the Other, sometimes forcing it into the background.”45 It is precisely in such cases, Butler writes, that the Other is viewed as an enemy and no longer as a face. “Palestinians, then, are not inherently ‘faceless,’” as Butler notes. Rather, they “only become so, I would say, under the conditions of enmity determined by Levinas. This preliminary absence of the enemy’s face would concern every enemy who corresponds to the conditions posited by Levinas.”46 From this angle, Butler speaks in favor of a politics in which the ethical responsibility for the Other also holds in situations of enmity, in which there is thus also an “enemy’s face.” Precisely this position makes it necessary for Butler to read against Levinas, even in other texts by him. In doing so, Delhom writes, Butler has to “play his ethical approach off against his political stance.” Delhom continues and clarifies along with Levinas: “That the otherness of the Other, then, takes on another character, that an enemy can thus appear in it, does not mean that the Other loses his otherness and, correspondingly, his face. Like war, enmity presupposes the transcendence of the enemy, otherwise they would not even be an enemy. It does mean, though, that this otherness becomes the object of a question of and a demand for justice, that the faces correspondingly become visible, and that an enemy can appear, just like a friend, a citizen, or an alien could appear.”47 It is therefore not the Other who changes in the presence of a third person but, rather, their otherness, which—based on my responsibility for them and for the third party whom they wrong—must become the object of a judgment for justice.48 In this conception of the political, the ethical relationship between human beings, which is posited face-to-face from the male perspective of Levinas, lies in the visual field of the third person and the additional Other, in which I must do justice to, be responsible for you and the Others in an unending move. The question about the male Other is explicitly also a question about the female Other. Rejecting any totalizing perspective, Levinas therefore denies the possibility, too, of describing questions of social relationships and of sexual relations, as Sabine Gürtler points out, “in models of symmetry or reciprocity. It it clear to him that what is female differs in another manner from what is male, just as what is male differs from what is female, without being able to define this other manner from a superior entity. The difference

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of the sexes makes it clear on a fundamental level that it is not meaningful or ethically possible to speak of the Other in the same manner.”49 In discussing Levinas and the critique of him by Luce Irigaray, Gürtler puts forward that the way and manner in which the female or the other sex appears to a male being does not admit of any pronouncements about the difference between the sexes “per se”—and even much less so about how “the male” or the other sex appears to a female being.50 The third female person is different to the female neighbor; that is, the second female person. Yet the third female person is also a different female neighbor. The epiphany of the visage as a visage opens up the human nature of humanity; “it shows in general the Other in every Other, who always belongs to a society that supports them, on the one hand, but that also coopts them, and who always being the Other is not, on the other hand, absorbed into it.”51 In this manner, the ethical relationship as an interpersonal relationship enters into the visual field in which society is not a predefined entity or a matter concluded by any social contract or, more specifically, understood as a genus for all human beings. Rather, it emerges more from situations in which it is disclosed in every face anew. Only from that aspect, by way of these encounters, does the question arise about a necessity for judgment, for the state, and for institutions.52 Every visage counts in their multiplicity. No one can rest and remain in themselves. Taking this positivity and impotence, too, as a point of departure, every visage—female and male—can perceive the other visages, be addressed by them. Both—passivity and impotence—make us capable of this perception, make this opening possible. I become human as a result of hearing the Other and responding to them. What do I, in a just manner, have to do for the Other? My being human is grounded from the perspective of the Other. 4.3 SENSE AND MEANING The line of sight is different to the usual one: I find myself not from my perspective but instead from your perspective. In his study “Meaning and Sense” (“La signification et le sens”), Levinas rewords this change in direction in detail: “The other who faces me is not included in the totality of being expressed. He arises behind every assembling of being as he to whom I express what I express. I find myself again facing another. He is neither a cultural signification nor a simple given. He is sense primordially, for he gives sense to expression itself, for it is only by him that a phenomenon as a meaning is, of itself, introduced into being.”53 It is not I who find myself in the face of me, of my self, but rather in face of you, in face of the Other. In this move, Levinas distinguishes between need and desire, so as to make clear that meaning is designated in being by way of desire. According to

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Levinas, need opens up to a world that is for me and, so doing, it returns to itself; even as the need for salvation, for example, it is still a pained longing for home, an aching for return; it is “the anxiety of the I for itself, egoism, the original form of identification. It is the assimilating of the world in view of self-coincidence, in view of happiness.”54 Against this, and along with Plato and Paul Valéry, Levinas posits “desire without lacking,” for example, so as to be able to move toward the Other, to find a way out of being, in order ultimately to be able to think from the perspective of the Other. In the case of Plato, it concerns the pure pleasures of figure, color, sound, odor, and experiences, when in his Philebus Socrates pronounces, for instance: “Audible sounds which are smooth and clear, and deliver a single series of pure notes, are beautiful not relative to something else, but in themselves, and they are attended by pleasures implicit in themselves.”55 Apparently, Valéry has been inspired by this desire in and of itself, when writing at the beginning of his poem “Canticle of the Columns”: Gentle columns, whose Hats day has flowered, Whom real birds choose to circle, entowered, Gentle columns, O Concert of separates! Each immolates Silence in unison. —What do you lift so high, Radiant equalities? —Toward a faultless desire Our studious litanies! We sing together That we support the sky! O single and wise voice That sings for the eye!56

Toward a faultless desire: Not the need for me, in concern for my self, which defines me, which fulfils my For-my-self in happiness but, rather, the desire for the Other, which proceeds from an already satisfied and independent being, which does not desire for its self, being part of a striving that is not stopped by any antecedent lacking. As a need of the one who has no needs, it is recognized in the need of an Other who is the Other. The desire for the Other arises in a being that lacks nothing. The desire for the Other is one for sociality; it is “born over and beyond all that can be lacking or that can satisfy him. In desire the I is borne toward the other in such a way as to compromise

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the sovereign self-identification of the I, for which need is but nostalgia, and which the consciousness of need anticipates. [. . .] The relationship with the other puts me into question, empties me of myself and empties me without end, showing me ever new resources.”57 In doing so, Levinas asks, is the desire for the Other an appetite or a generosity? And he answers that the desirable does not satisfy my desire but, rather, lets it grow by nourishing me with new hunger. In this regard, desire is revealed to be goodness or mercy, and Levinas makes this goodness or mercy clear with an example from Fyodor M. Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, in which Sonya Marmeladova talks with Raskolnikov about her stepmother Katerina Ivanovna: ‘Katerina Ivanovna used to beat you, didn’t she, at your father’s place?’ ‘No, no! What are you saying? Not at all!’ Sonya glanced up at him with a kind of terror. ‘You love her, then?’ ‘Her? Of course I do!’ wailed Sonya, suddenly clasping her hands in pain. ‘Oh! You . . . If you only knew. She’s just like a child . . . She’s almost lost her mind . . . from grief. To think how clever she was . . . how generous . . . how kind! You don’t know anything, anything . . . oh!’ Sonya said this in a kind of despair, in turmoil and pain, wringing her hands. Again, her pale cheeks flushed; torment was in her eyes. One could see how deeply everything had affected her, how unbearable was her desire to express something, to speak, to intercede. Some kind of insatiable compassion, if one can put it like that, was suddenly etched in every feature of her face.58

From this scene that plays out face-to-face between Raskolnikov and Sonya Marmeladova, Levinas elaborates the compassion Sonya Marmeladova feels for her stepmother, which is shown on her face to be insatiable. It is insatiable and not inexhaustible, as Levinas points out, as if the compassion that proceeds from her to Raskolnikov “were a hunger which the presence of Raskolnikov nourishes beyond any saturation, increasing this hunger to infinity.”59 As part of the desire for the Other, this hunger is a social experience; the desire for the Other is a fundamental movement, a pure transport, an absolute orientation, sense: Does the direction toward the Other make clear that the Other is not just “the collaborator and the neighbor of our cultural work of expression or the client of our artistic production, but the interlocutor—he to whom expression expresses, for whom celebration celebrates, both term of an orientation and primary signification?”60 As part of the analysis of desire, what matters to Levinas is to achieve an analysis of otherness toward which desire is carried. To be sure, the

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manifestation of the Other occurs in the same manner as every meaning occurs, for even the Other is present in a cultural whole and is explained by this coherence, just as a text is explicated by its context. In the process, however, making the whole known vouchsafes its being present, which is elucidated by the light of the world. Conceiving the Other thus turns out to be a kind of hermeneutics, an exegesis, for the Other is given in the concreteness of his totality, to which they are immanent, and which “is expressed and disclosed by our own cultural initiative, by corporeal, linguistic or artistic gestures.”61 And yet the appearance, the epiphany of the Other receives a meaning of its own, which is independent of this meaning received from the world. The Other comes to us not only from the context yet also signifies without this mediating, conveying meaning by itself. The cultural meaning that reveals and is revealed—from the “historical world to which it belongs,” as Levinas points out—“this mundane meaning is disturbed and jostled by another presence that is abstract (or, more exactly, absolute) and not integrated into the world.”62 Here, too, Levinas carries out a move in his thinking which attempts to make a transition that does not go from the ethical to the political but from the cultural to the ethical instead, with the inclusion of the distinction between need and desire, in a renewed change of horizon, against whose background the cultural meaning is revealed. Levinas has the other presence come to us, making an entrance whose meaning occurs in what is ethical earlier than in what is cultural and earlier than in what is aesthetic. In this way, in other words, a contrast becomes clear between the concepts of totality and infinity. Totality circumscribes a space of the self, in which each and every thing and each and every one appears as the part of a whole or as the instance of a law. Waldenfels puts forward that for Levinas it does not make much difference whether “the whole is represented by means of archaic forms of religious or mythological participation or by modern forms of rational mediation, which are structured in economics, politics, and culture. No one is themself, even under modern auspices, since every one of us is reduced to the service that we anonymously render.”63 The lives of human beings and their labors are a mask.64 Totality forces every individual into defined roles and is grounded in violence, which does not end, either, when the striving for self-preservation of any one individual makes use of rational means. In opposition to totality understood as such is infinity, the infinity of the Other, whose otherness transgresses the limits of any order whatsoever. This contrast between totality and infinity is kept in motion, for a continuing process of totalization stands counter to an inverse process of transgression, which is expressed in the presence that makes an entrance, in the phenomenon that makes up the appearance of the Other, the phenomenon that is simultaneously a visage. The presence of the visage denotes an irrefutable order—a command—which disables the availability of

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the consciousness. The I in the face of the Other is infinitely responsible. That is desire: burning with a fire that is different than the need that is quenched by satisfaction; thinking above and beyond what we think.65 Levinas puts this exceeding, uncatchable intensification into a relation linking the I to the Other. He calls this relation the “idea of the infinite,” which is desire, and it consists paradoxically of thinking more than that which is thought, and, so doing, “maintaining what is thought in this very excess relative to thought—in entering into a relationship with the ungraspable while guaranteeing its status of being ungraspable.”66 In the process, it is a matter for Levinas of emphasizing that the infinite is not any correlate of the idea of the infinite, comparable with the idea that is an intentionality, and which therefore can be fulfilled in its object. Instead, it is more that the “wonder of infinity in the finite is an overwhelming of intentionality, an overwhelming of that appetite for light which is in intentionality; unlike the saturation in which intentionality subsides, infinity confounds its idea.”67 In relation to the infinite, then, the I is the impossibility of stopping its moving forward, of being able to elude responsibility, “to not have a hiding place of inwardness where one comes back into oneself, to march forward without concern for oneself.”68 In this way the demands placed on me grow as well, for the more I do for my responsibilities, the more I am responsible. Capability, which is constituted from “impotencies”——that is putting consciousness into question and its entering into a concurrence of relations, which are radically different than revelation. In this ethical relationship, in the visage, sense thus becomes designated, according to Levinas. Even so, sense—in the way Levinas develops it in regard of the epiphany of the visage (and as he himself also remarks)—raises an issue, which inheres in the question of the visage itself: Is this beyond of what can be determined, of what can be fixed, from which the visage derives, not for its part an understood and merely revealed idea? The visage, as Levinas points out in his response, is abstract. “[T]he abstraction of a face is a visitation and a coming. It disturbs immanence without settling into the horizons of the world.”69 The abstraction of the visage cannot be preserved by any logical process that would transition from the substance of beings, from what is individual, to the general. On the contrary, he writes, it goes toward these beings yet does not join with them, withdrawing from them. The abstraction is due to the elsewhere from which it comes and into which it withdraws, though not as any symbolic reference to this elsewhere as to a terminus. The visage presents itself in its nudity. Not as a form that hides a background thereby showing that background, and not as a phenomenon, that hides a thing in itself thereby betraying it, for in that case the visage would be nothing other than a mask, by which a visage is presupposed. The nude visage

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of the Other is absolute. It separates itself from the Same, from the Self that I am; it is separate from me, for it is outside of me, and it is absolute, because it enters as the concrete epiphany of infinity and thus comes from on high, because it is concrete abstractness, for the other points above and beyond their culture and history.70 In an interview with Jacques Message and Joël Roman, Levinas expounds on the further meaning of the visage, which goes beyond the face: “In Life and Fate, Grossmann tells how in Lubyanka, in Moscow, before the infamous gate where one could convey letters or packages to friends and relatives arrested for ‘political crimes’ or get news of them, people formed a line, each reading on the nape of the person in front of him the feelings and hopes of his misery.”—His interlocutors interrupt: “And the nape is a face . . . ” Levinas responds: “Grossmann isn’t saying that the nape is a face, but that all the weakness, all the mortality, all the naked and disarmed mortality of the other can be read from it. He doesn’t say it that way, but the face can assume meaning on what is the ‘opposite’ of the face! The face, then, is not the color of the eyes, the shape of the nose, the ruddiness of the cheeks, etc.”71 Do we not respond, Levinas asks, in the presence of the Other to an “‘order’ in which signifyingness remains an irremissible disturbance, an utterly bygone past?”72 The beyond of what can de determined, of what can be fixed, from which the visage comes, signifies as a trace. The visage thus lingers in the trace of the absent, which is utterly past, utterly bygone. “Everything that constitutes my life with its past and its future is assembled in the present in which things come to me. But it is in the trace of the other that a face shines: what is presented there is absolving itself from my life and visits me as already absolute. Someone has already passed. His trace does not signify his past, as it does not signify his labor or his enjoyment in the world; it is a disturbance imprinting itself (we are tempted to say engraving itself) with an irrecusable gravity.”73 The visage is shown to be transcendence, infinity, which exceeds any signification that cannot or, rather, can never be discovered: A sense that is not finality.

Chapter 5

Responsivity of the Lived Body

We encounter each other. You see me. I see You. We greet each other. We move in the field of the present and take what we currently see in front of and around us as our point of departure; we find ourselves in the realm of what is current, in the realm of things. Our bodily situation is constituted—in line with Husserl, it reveals—such that what is encountered by us in the current situation is itself manifested as something that has come into being (etwas Gewordenes). Our sense goes through a becoming (Werden), a genesis in the world. The world does not join in from the outside, merely filling in, but, rather, the situation discloses itself as being of the world (welthaft) inasmuch as what is encountered by me here and now makes reference above and beyond itself. What do we mean by that? 5.1 ACTUALITY AND HABITUALITY In his Cartesian Meditations, Husserl cites an example that illustrates his additionally genetic phenomenology; for him, it revolves around a thing that we deal with on practical terms: a pair of scissors. “The child who already sees physical things understands, let us say, for the first time the final sense of scissors; and from now on he sees scissors at the first glance as scissors—but naturally not in an explicit reproducing, comparing, and inferring.”1 Instead, they become aware of the scissors, comprehend them in apperception, which is not a conclusion by analogy, not an act of thinking. “Every apperception in which we apprehend at a glance, and noticingly grasp, objects given beforehand—for example, in the already-given everyday world—every apperception in which we understand their sense and its horizons forthwith, points back to a ‘primal instituting,’ in which an object with a similar sense became constituted for the first time. Even the physical things of this world that are unknown to us are, to speak generally, known in respect of their type. We have already seen like things before, though not precisely this thing 69

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here. Thus each everyday experience involves an analogizing transfer of an originally instituted objective sense to a new case, with its anticipative apprehension of the object as having a similar sense. To the extent that there is givenness beforehand, there is such a transfer. At the same time, that sensecomponent in further experience which proves to be actually new may function in turn as institutive and found a pregivenness that has a richer sense.”2 Forty-four years ago, as a four-year-old child in kindergarten in Paderborn, I saw a pair of scissors for the first time and did not know what they were. I was playing with them, admonished of course by my classmate to be careful, though still managed to cut myself in my right thumb. As a result, I learned how I have to use scissors; I came to learn how adults use them, came to learn what a pair of scissors is. Yet this coming to learn (Er-lernen) something would subsequently imply an un-learning (Ver-lernen): in my primary school in the town of Schlangen near Paderborn, I can see myself as a six-year-old, left-handed child being forced by the school administration to adapt to right-handedness when first writing. That is how I again lost the use of scissors I had come to learn, and how to this day I am unable to cut straight, without any control over it. My body withdraws. In the process, despite all the conditioning of bodily techniques, I experience what can be described as alienation from one’s own body. As a forty-eight-year-old adult, I see the pair of scissors lying on my desk and, in line with Husserl, there is a manifold history manifested in this object: first of all, my personal history, during the course of which I learned, after I injured my right thumb, what a pair of scissors is, in the process of a kind of culturally coming to learn—we might declare—one that is continued in calling that same process into question. The scissors themselves refer to a history of technology, tools, and production; they are not a simple object that surfaces out of nothing but, rather, they embody a personal and a collective history. In active and passive acquisition, scissors gain an additionally artistic component and serve as an aid, for example, for clipping into the color in paper-cutting. In his small primer on art, which emerged while contemplating the cut-outs he pasted together for the book titled Jazz, Henri Matisse called this process “drawing with scissors.”3 Matisse’s paper cut-outs for his volume Jazz is a work with figures from mythology and folklore including, among others, Icarus, a clown, and a knife-thrower. The artist began by “painting” them with scissors on prepared sheets of paper, colored in gouache paints. Uniting drawing, painting, and sculpting, he cut into the colors and put together bodies in scenic arrangements on tables, accompanied by texts: “These images, in vivid and violent tones, have resulted from crystallizations of memories of the circus, of popular tales, or of travel. I have made these pages of writing to appease the simultaneous oppositions of my chromatic

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and rhythmic improvisations, pages forming a kind of ‘sonorous background’ which carries them, which surrounds them and thus protects their distinctiveness.”4 In the image titled The Clown, it is precisely this distinctiveness that Matisse achieves extemporaneously in his here and now. It develops from Matisse’s being practiced in cutting out and pasting the appearance of the jester in white, cut into and pasted in front of a black background, following patterns, framed by a yellow curtain. The curtain’s wavy shape and the rhythm of the black line, in turn, hints at the movement of the artist on the stage. In this way, an additional frame places him in the center of a circus ring, whose blue construction is interrupted by white bars. Centering the attention of the observer, then, by way of the scissor artist’s improvisation and invention, a prancing clown moves, which is further pronounced by the addition of designs of red flames on the clown’s body. A well-composed distribution of the individual paper elements becomes clear, making the jester’s head appear as if it were dynamically intruding into the space, for example, as a practice activated by way of improvising structures, like that of a jazz musician, so to speak, who comes on stage and begins to play. “Looking at Life with the Eyes of a Child.”5 Matisse’s work The Clown also belongs in the context of getting to know (Kennenlernen) something. “Everything that we see in our daily life is more or less distorted by acquired habits.”6 The image might have come from studying the biography of Etienne de Silhouette, the French minister of finance during the eighteenth century, who allegedly decorated his castle not with expensive paintings but with inexpensive paper cuttings, thus lending rather involuntarily his name Silhouette to them. The Clown is revealed in its everyday nature and continues to inspire, as when following along the lines of Jean Starobinski, we ask about the matter of art by way of the portrait of the artist as a jester. Then we determine “that the use of the clown image is more than simply the choosing of a pictorial or poetic motif—it is an indirect and parodic way of questioning art itself. Since the Romantic era (although there were few precursors), the buffoon, the saltimbanque, and the clown have served as the hyperbolic and deliberately deforming images that artists have taken pleasure in presenting of themselves and of the state of art.”7 By way of the concealed self-representation of the artists, a poetics of the clown emerges; and in structuring that representation, the clown illustrates something essential for humanity. It makes humankind conscious of their condition. Taking this poetics as its point of departure, Matisse’s creation is one that could be attached to the scissors belonging to his cut-outs. It is a creative activity that, according to Matisse himself, happens with an effort that is necessary for liberating oneself of the distortion resulting from acquired habits that come from prefabricated images. Doing so, from Matisse’s perspective, demands courage from the artist, “who has to look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time: he has to look

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at life as he did when he was a child and, if he loses that faculty, he cannot express himself in an original, that is, a personal way.”8 In habitualizing, as a result of occupational activity, yet also as a result of distortion, what the artist has thus come to know enters into the world, into the image; the creative act acquires deposits or—in the words of Husserl, who makes use of a term from geology—becomes sedimented. We are dealing here with an entangled history of images, technique, tools, design, as well as of production and reception—a history that comprises scissors and paper-cutting in equal measure. Next to each paper cut-out hangs another that refers to additional ones. In keeping with Husserl, this juncture makes visible a component of likewise artistic activity and learning, the actuality of the lived body in dealing with things in a practical way. At this juncture, too, a second component comes in, that of repeated action. As a result of the repeated deed, Matisse acquires a certain habitus. He has a habit that is not what he is just doing, like positioning cut-outs, but also what is moreover at his disposal. In encountering the pair of scissors time and again as a pair of scissors, he is able to visualize variations that start with the scissors, like the silhouette; his repeated action becomes sedimented, layered with deposits in equal measure. Even for Matisse, “habituating” means, in Husserl’s phrasing, that we are learning to dwell in the world, and that a world for us emerges in general. It is precisely this interlacing of actuality and habituality that Husserl and Matisse document here, that they teach, in line as well with the Latin term docere. In Husserl, fundamental observations of phenomenology are connected by way of “actual human beings,” as real an object as any other in the natural world, in the execution of acts of consciousness, which are part and parcel of the human subject, as the occurrence of natural reality. Not as an animated physical body (Körper) but as lived and experienced subjectively, the body (Leib) becomes a pathic event, one that belongs to no order of representation. Our bodily situation, in which we now sit—or stand, see, hear, perceive—and to which Matisse also belongs visually, thus refers to more than what is given Here and Now. Situation and experience have meaning from the perspective of the world—from the position of the one observing, speaking, perceiving—and comprise the subjectivity of perceiving, the intentionality of being directed toward an object, with the objectivity of expression, with an occurrence that emerges, like the cut as an expression in an ontological ordering of bodily and artistic gestures. Here and Now is coming face-to-face with the Other of one in a cultural totality, at the site of the horizon, where they are present and appear as a result of the totality, just like the thing as a result of its context. In the creative expression, in which what is expressed is inseparable from the expression, we are at once both subject and part of the world. In corporeal experience, expression, impact, and/or artistic creation are set down before the horizon of the world, move it into the light, define culture,

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and in this way take part not only in ontological ordering but are themselves also ontological, in that they make the comprehension of Being possible. Our world proves to be one of open phenomena, in which an embrace takes place between my subjective body, the world, and the subjective body of the Other. 5.2 INTERCORPOREALITY At this juncture, we can proceed with Bernhard Waldenfels’s considerations on the phenomenology of the lived body so as to put forward that the scissors also take part, on a linguistic level, in the metaphorical imagery of cutting— especially where there are incisive events and intersections—as well as in renewed recourse to Husserl, as part of an acquisition that is both active as well as passive: “Active acquisition would be that which stems from earlier activities, which I have acquired as a result of repeated action; it shapes one’s personal history. Passive acquisition refers to that which precedes my own activity, to a kind of learning that belongs to the prehistory of an individual. Active acquisition concerns the history of an individual, passive acquisition their prehistory.”9 Central to the thought in Waldenfels’s philosophy of the lived body is its radical alien nature. This thinking has its start in a critique of the history of occidental philosophy, in which what is alien, as something ordinary and familiar, possesses only a passing or precursory character and can be overcome: it has a relativizing effect that originates from an overall order for all perception and action; it started with the understanding of the cosmos in ancient thought, which comprises what is particular and what is alien, as well as spheres of inclusivity, familiarity, and accessibility—such as the Self and the Other, totality, the lived body—thus integrating what is alien. Subsequently, the alien appears only as something secondary, is reflected or modified only in the I, the ego, which in turn moves to the center of the sphere of peculiar ownness (Eigenheitssphäre) (Descartes), from which everything is measured, everything Other and Alien appropriated and bridled. The I and the Others neutralize the Alien (David Hume), whose essential nature remains unrecognized. All-encompassing reason and the autonomous subject do not recognize any alien nature (Immanuel Kant). In this way, throughout history the Alien has not been thought through but, rather, subordinated to the particular and a whole. Instead of this relative thinking, Waldenfels posits a radical understanding of being alien across his entire work and thus resituates the Alien into the realms of experience and of claims: there in the occurrence what is Alien cannot be traced back to something of one’s own nor can it be exclusively ordered into a whole; rather, it belongs first of all to an intermediary realm in which it is intertwined with the particular and the Other. Accordingly, Waldenfels’s critique is directed against disregarding challenges

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by what is Alien, and his phenomenology of the Alien therefore attains its meaning in a realm that is also established outside the Self, and which refers at the same time to what belongs to an Other and to what is of an alien nature, to what is considered to be strange. In this context, corporeality as intercorporeality plays a central role, which in the case of Waldenfels is closely linked to being alien. In his early work, considerations on corporeality are developed by way of open experience, understood as a creative occurrence. Such an event is introduced in various dimensions of the corporeal Self, of sense and intention, of social processes of communication, intersubjective linguistic structures and communicative occurrences, as well as norms and contexts for actions and behaviors in different lifeworlds; it is discussed by way of motifs like violence, work, technology, rationality, economics, and art. His later work since 1997 pursues these considerations above and beyond existing traditions, customs, conventions, and rules, focusing on corporeal behavior as a way of behaving and experiencing, which decidedly does not start with the ego, with the subject, but begins instead with the claim of the Other and in the response to the Alien. Gradually, Waldenfels’s work draws up a theory of responsivity anchored in the lived body, a theory that thematizes responding even in a bodily sense as a basic trait of all human behavior and creativity, and which thus additionally comes to be applied in an intensified way in the arts and in media, in analyses of their aesthetics and ethics, as in contextualizations between theatre, dance, and film, for example. His early socio-philosophical study Das Zwischenreich des Dialogs (The Intermediate Realm of the Dialogue, 1971) had already indicated approaches to fundamentally calling into question the relationship between ego, consciousness, and the world; to thinking the Other together with the Alien; to differentiating bodily behaviors, even in view of already existing thoughts on the topic. At this point, Waldenfels began his considerations with an analysis of Husserl’s phenomenology, calling into question his concept of intentionality: the basic property of consciousness, to perceive something as something, by which every act of perception, experience, memory, and imagination is determined. In keeping with Husserl, it refers to an intentional behavior that is related to something, which is thinkable only as a subjective occurrence, though not as an objective one. The subject has things opposite, without being an opposite. How does the situation change, though, if the opposite of the subject—that which is perceived by the subject “as something”—is a human being, an Other? Waldenfels makes it clear that, according to Husserl, the subject purports intentional framing, “in which the Others encounter me de facto; since I constitute the Others without being constituted by them from the same source, then the others are in the first place subordinated to me.”10 Waldenfels

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declares himself to disagree with this hierarchization and henceforth undertakes a critique of Husserl’s concept of intentionality in three steps: to be sure, the Other is also opposite the I in this encounter, yet the ego is the precondition for having something opposite, not the result of it. A reciprocal nature, according to the first step, is therefore not possible. Everything proceeds from the ego. In a second step, Waldenfels takes note of this intentionality’s “peculiar dynamic,” because it also denotes a goal-oriented “meaning” that “is fulfilled or frustrated as a result of what is meant”:11 in the relationship between the I and the Other, the initiative always proceeds unilaterally from the ego; the possibility that this something encounters an Other on its own is still excluded. Expectations, which can be fulfilled or frustrated, are thus linked together in a detailed way; and so, the processes of consciousness are connected with value judgments. In a third step, Waldenfels views the latitude for experience as restrained, as the Other is trapped by the I in an ordering system, thus adding as an individual just as little that is “radically innovative” as a thing.12 In this context, then, the mutual moments of surprise are missing, those of preemption, of happenstance, of confrontations with the unfamiliar, of making claims, of recognizing (and of acknowledging) the autonomy of the Other, of thematizing an experience of the Alien in contrast to the experience of self. What do these three qualifications for Husserl’s intentionality denote in relation to the Other and the Alien, in regard of the conception of corporeality, as it is still emerging here? Waldenfels is consciously distancing himself from the antecedent hierarchy between the I and the Other, which in the first instance favours the ego and then the Other, in order to elaborate the claim of the Other, who encounters the ego “from the same source”: the Other, too, appears in their selfhood, has a sphere of peculiar ownness, takes the initiative, and is of the same origin as the I.13 In this way, an open-ended and creative intermediate occurrence (Zwischengeschehen) arises, which Waldenfels discusses from the perspective of language, in the exchange of questions and answers, as a dialogic field of tension. In this interplay, basic traits of human action are demonstrated in dealing with one another as mediated by the world (our common corporeality); in direct access to each other (the I/You relationship); in the existing connection to one another (the world’s being-for-us, i.e., für-uns-Sein der Welt), and in the fight against one another (interruption, disintegration of dialogue). As a consequence, “behavioral latitudes” are also opened up in a study of the same name (i.e., Spielräume des Verhaltens, 1980), pointing to a kind of corporeal behavior. Intertwined with Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, that disposition raises the question, first of all, as to what it means that human beings have or use a subjective body, that they are and exist in that lived body: According to Waldenfels, the lived body (Leib) is a basic phenomenon, one that always participates in constituting other phenomena like time, language,

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or Others: all of these are mixed together in every one of life’s layers, all are always and everywhere present. In this regard, we can state that Waldenfels distinguishes between the subjective body (Leib) as the totality of the Self and the objective body (Körper) as the materiality of that lived body. He thus proposes to speak of a kind of phenomenology that is oriented toward the lived body, a phenomenology that “in its investigations and conceptualizations, directly or indirectly, always takes into consideration the lived body and the bodily situation.”14 From his earlier work forward, this investigation of a corporeal situation has occupied the phenomenologist Waldenfels. For understanding his concept of corporeality (Leiblichkeit), we can again point out a three-step evolution, like that already presented with his reflections on the concept of intentionality: in an initial step in this regard we need to bear in mind first of all the lasting influence of Merleau-Ponty and his considerations on intercorporeality (Zwischenleiblichkeit), because Merleau-Ponty’s observations prominently influence Waldenfels’s concept of the lived body. In a second step, Levinas’s thoughts on alterity are brought in, which likewise have found their resonance in research by Waldenfels. With the aid of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, expositions on these intertwined reflections are expanded upon in a third step by the category of the Alien, which proves to be central to the concept of Waldenfels. It gains particular significance in respect of understanding of his concept of responsivity, to be presented in what follows. The subjective body (Leib) as the totality of the Self and the objective body (Körper) as the materiality of that lived body is a distinction that Waldenfels makes in relation to the bodily situation of human beings. What concerns is he pursuing with this distinction and this situational relation? Waldenfels repositions the lived body into the world and—like Merleau-Ponty, for example—pursues a philosophy that is oriented toward experience, actions, and behavior. In this way he does not cover an exclusively physiological realm that asks what the lived body is, what it looks like, and what properties it has. Instead, he raises questions more about the performance and function of the lived body in perception, in sensation, in sexuality, and in language. In doing so, the viewpoints of femininity and masculinity are fundamental for the subjective body, which always appears as gendered. In order to describe this lived body in action, Waldenfels proposes to start by seeing what is feminine and what is masculine as preobjective qualities that admit of analogical transitions and fluid boundaries. Used as morphological concepts—which, in line with Husserl, allow only “fluid spheres of application” in their own peculiar vagueness—these properties thus elude unequivocal ascriptions and normative fixations, without thereby denying polarizations, tensions, and divisions, however.15

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The lived body is alway in play; it functions as a transfer point, even when we talk about it, as Waldenfels points out. The lived body exerts an effect in language, as in the declaration “Here I stand,” which indicates one’s bodily situating in the world, which enters into our speech, into the propositional content, into the declaration and its topic. Waldenfels discusses something comparable for the German expression “Es geht” (literally: “It goes,” that is: “It’s okay” or “It works”). The phrase not only metaphorically describes a line of thinking but also bears in mind a moment of corporeal self-movement (körperlicher Selbstbewegung). He does the same, too, for the declaration “Es ist kalt” (“It’s cold”), which presupposes a being that senses cold and points to the sensitivity of the lived body. Hence, in his lectures on the phenomenology of the subjective body (Das leibliche Selbst), for example, Waldenfels looks at relations in the world and points out that a freezing condition not only registers and addresses the qualities we encounter. Rather, it also includes our sensing of self (Sich-empfinden), in which the subjective body in its sensing cold relates to itself. Moreover, this lived body relates to the phenomenon of cold in the world and thus has a relation to the world, which is interlaced with the relation to self: “In this act of sensing, I encounter the world, and in sensing—in the manner and way we encounter the world—I sense myself at the same time, I myself feel relieved, burdened, or however”16—in this case: cold and freezing. The sensing of self is occasioned in the world or in the Other; it illustrates a relation to the Self, to the world, to the Other, and to the Alien. Waldenfels goes back to Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on intercorporeality (Zwischenleiblichkeit), so as to go more deeply into the question of how together we relate to things in the world communally. What he finds to be essential in this model is the in-between (Zwischen), the intermediate world that corresponds to an intermediate sphere, which Merleau-Ponty in turn circumscribes with the significant figure of the chiasm or of the act of intertwining. In this regard, Waldenfels’s concept of the lived body differentiates between one’s own body and that of an alien body: “In regard of one’s own body (Eigenleib) and the alien body (Fremdleib), chiasm or intertwining means that both result from differentiating that is always only relative. One’s own body and the alien body are spheres of their own, which are each characterized by an act referring to the self and one referring to the alien, relations that go in both directions. In the process, both spheres are found to be partially congruent; they are moved towards each other, more or less.”17 A space of intercorporeality opens up in which the particular, the own, intertwines with the alien, and in which the individual is not just a part of the whole—as, say, in a family or a nation—but, rather, in which they have something of their own that still removes them from the alien. Waldenfels begins his considerations at the level of perception and focuses on the transition from one kind of corporeality into the other and back again.18

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In Waldenfels, in contrast to Husserl, ways of experience do not have their origin with the ego, with the subject, but decidedly take their start in the unforeseeable claim of the alien instead. The in-between (Zwischen) opens up an intermediate world (Zwischenwelt), a commonality that is lived and experienced, an intermediate occurrence (Zwischengeschehen) between me and Others; it can be rendered visible at every stage of experience. In doing so, Waldenfels cites as examples sensing, acting, and handling. In sensing, I am taking part in the lives of Others by sensing with them, in the sense of sharing in their pain or their joy. I am similarly affected by the lives of Others. If things are good with you, then I also feel good; via the Other, the shared joy reaches me. My joy is therefore not simply a state that I find myself in or that I bring about; instead, it clarifies an act of finding oneself (Sich-befinden) with Others in the world, which goes above and beyond mere subjectivization. In acting (Handeln), a synergy can be determined, in which our own and alien deeds enmesh in one another. This synergy cannot be coordinated as individual actions in the sense of one interaction; instead, it repositions each action to where it plays out: in the intermediate sphere (Zwischensphäre) in which I cannot unequivocally decide what my action or the action of the Other is. What is decisive for Waldenfels is that “the in-between differentiates and does not make combinations from individual acts performed.”19 In handling (Hantieren), the claim of Others is relocated into the sphere of what is tangible, between hand, touching, and handshake: my hand, too, is open to the access of Others. In this case, above and beyond touching oneself (Selbstberührung)—which includes a doubled act of sensing in which the touching, holding hand becomes the touched, held hand and vice versa—the alien hand makes possible something touching that is touched, something holding that is held, and enables—as in the case of Merleau-Ponty—an act of intersubjective reaching across, of overlap, which arises from an act of touching that responds. It is from Merleau-Ponty that Waldenfels adopts thoughts on what is done together in one’s own and in alien deeds, which play out in this intermediate sphere and are to be understood reciprocally. Waldenfels highlights in detail open situations for acting that, in the interplay of my hands between touching myself and touching the alien, also point to the untouchable in what is touched, which in turn may appear as something untouchable that refuses our access. The handshake reveals manual relations and corporeal stages of experience that illustrate various ways of behaving and produce different levels of relations, which cannot be conceived without the claim of the Other. In this regard, in keeping with Levinas, Waldenfels pays regard to an asymmetrical character that refers to this claim: the exchange with the Other does not take place just on one level, since the Other preempts my expectations and conceptions: giving my hand already denotes that I am giving something that does

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not belong to me alone. It has already been claimed by the Other, and I can take a position only in responding to them. In doing so, I am overcome by the alienness of the Other; it surprises me, interrupts my intentions, before I understand it in any specific way. At this juncture, in line with both Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, the ethical dimension is shown in Waldenfels’s philosophy of the lived body, which on the plane of seeing, hearing, and touching, on the plane of the senses, is already posing initial questions about the manner and way we live and about the claims awaiting us and their consequences. The appearance of the Other is conceived together with being alien; the category of the alien proves to be significant for understanding bodily experience. What does Waldenfels understand the Alien to be? 5.3 ALIENNESS In the first place, the alien—as defined in Waldenfels’s study Topographie des Fremden (Topography of the Alien [1997], the first volume of four in the series Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden)—is established in a realm outside of my Self (cf. externum, extraneum, peregrinum; ξέvov; étranger; foreign), referring at the same time to what belongs to an Other (cf. άλλότριov; alienum; alien), as well as to something that is of an alien nature, considered to be strange (cf. insolitum; ξέvov; étrange; strange). At this juncture, following Antje Kapust, it is important to point out that alienness is not understood by Waldenfels to be negative, “e.g., as what is not known (das Unbekannte), what is not understood (das Unverstandene), or what we have not yet understood or are not yet able to extrapolate”: alienness does not represent a negative figure of deficiency, neither “hermeneutically as a deficit of sense” or “regulatively as a deviation from a norm,” “nor practically as a deficiency in realizing something.” According to Kapust, alienness “as a figure of withdrawal (Entzug) is related to the three dimensions of order, the Self, and the Other, thereby characterizing something extraordinary, an alienness with or in ourselves and the alienness of the Other.”20 Waldenfels conceives of the alien relation not just with respect to the Other, but he understands it instead in its interlacing with a relation to self, which includes moments of a withdrawal from self and points to the alienness of one’s own lived body. This lived, subjective body (again: Leib) is always already present, before we think it through; it is already active, before we are able to comprehend it. Our own body precedes, in a move of its own; it functions in an antecedent way, limiting thematization and verbalization: in looking at my Self in the mirror, I surprise myself and see myself as the Other; in the moment of weariness, the lived body’s movement becomes independent and withdraws

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from me; in the instant of the echo, I hear my voice and it sounds alien to me. The lived body’s incomprehensibility—as Waldenfels points out in his work Antwortregister (Response Register)—is exponentiated; corporeality “forms something like disquiet in the hustle and bustle of life and does so on the basis of an interior ambiguity, a doubling into the functioning subjective body and the objective body as a thing, into the soul of the body and the organism of the body, into the being of the body and the having of the organism, into the subjective body and the objective body, or however one might designate this double character.”21 In Waldenfels, the lived body cannot come to rest, neither in a realm of things nor in a realm of ideas, neither in a realm of nature nor in a realm of spirit, neither in a realm of necessity nor in a realm of freedom”; as a consequence of its “exponentiated form of self-doubling (Selbstverdopplung), it slips away from itself as soon as it tries to grasp itself.”22 This approach is interlaced with considerations on the Other, which likewise appears in self-being (Selbstsein), has a sphere of peculiar ownness (again: Eigenheitssphäre) that can seize the initiative and creates disquiet. In this regard, Waldenfels fundamentally draws attention to the notion that one’s own lived body cannot be conceived without the lived body of the Other: the Other’s body is always already present; I live in the visual field of the Other and do not belong entirely to myself; I exist in the world together with Others. In connection with this notion Waldenfels develops the concept central to his philosophy; that is, the responsivity of the lived body. Corporeality is understood by Waldenfels as a way of behaving and experiencing, as was touched upon already in the previous expositions on sensing and on shaking hands. In the case of Waldenfels, corporeality responds to alien claims, and by way of this answer (cf. response) Waldenfels therefore understands it as responsive. In addition to intentionality and communicativity, he views an act of responding to alien claims as a basic trait of bodily behavior. All three of these realms comprise the concept of responsivity, whereby terms like “corporeal responsorium” (leibliches Responsorium), “pathos,” and “diastasis” accrue central significance. In the process, a responsive ethics is developed, taking the concept of responding, of answering, as the point of departure. In the case of Waldenfels, the term responsivity circumscribes a basic feature of bodily behavior that calls on the inventiveness of the objective body—as, for example, with seeing or feeling—and highlights a kind of responding so as to engage what is alien, which can then be surmounted with available means of the particular and the common, via regulations, objectives, and pragmatic conditions.23 With this concept, the constitution of the lived body is put forward as one that is uncertain. The term is borrowed from the medical studies of Kurt Goldstein on the structure of the human organism, in which he means responsivity to be the capability of the organism, of the individual, to respond

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adequately to the demands of its surroundings. If it does not succeed in doing so—as, for example, during illness—then Goldstein speaks of a kind of irresponsivity.24 Waldenfels locates a further source in Mikhail Bakhtin who, in his studies on art and responsibility, connects the word not only to its speaker but also to its listener, in that every word also includes a certain conception of the listener, against their apperceptive background, from the degree of their responsiveness, their perceptible distance.25 To that thought Waldenfels connects an interest in Bakhtin’s poetics, which he describes as polyphonic, in which an implicit philosophy can be found, which can also be used for a critical understanding of Plato. From that insight, Waldenfels makes use of Bakhtin’s fundamental motif of dialogue, so as to analyze the in-between (Zwischen) further.26 Centered in Bakhtin’s theory of the novel—which Bakhtin primarily develops by way of Dostoevsky’s writings—Waldenfels works out the word to be something that in his case is not subjected to rules of langue as a linguistic unit; instead, the word is inferred from dialogic communication, which Bakhtin sees as “the authentic sphere where language lives.”27 The word acts as the event, as the linguistic event, and is thus “not any secondary carrier of thought, not a conglomerate made up of subjective and objective factors, but the embodiment of an idea, which comes up in discussion and, in the process, is an embodiment of a person who speaks.”28 The word as a speech event, moreover, acts as a double-voiced word, or, as Bakhtin puts it, “half someone else’s.”29 It denotes a “rejoinder, directed toward its referential object, [which] is at the same time reacting intensely to someone else’s word, answering it and anticipating it.”30 Inspired as well by this poetics of heteroglossia, of being many-voiced, Waldenfels begins his conception of responsivity by distinguishing between a reply in the narrow sense (cf. to answer) and one in the broader sense (cf. to respond). Answering in the narrow sense involves imparting information and conveying knowledge: I am asked about something and provide an answer for it; I am asked for directions and impart the information willingly. In this case, Waldenfels puts answering forth as a special transfer of knowledge, which it is no longer limited to in the case of responding in a broader sense, if the alien claim is also imagined, as soon as, for example, the response to the question is not made: no answer is also an answer, because the other is there before me with their claim, demanding something from me. As such, responding in a broader sense is not limited to language but goes above and beyond it and may include closing one’s eyes or shutting one’s ears, or refusing to shake hands in the case of a handshake. In developing his concept, Waldenfels is interested first of all in intentionality, which he understands in the sense of the to-what-end (Woraufhin) of a behavior or of a lived experience. However, rules may also sneak in, such as right-handed greetings and handshakes,

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which Waldenfels puts in the context of communicativity (cf. Habermas), which he also considers in order to point out the possibility of subjective intentions (cf. Gadamer) through to intersubjective regulations. By contrast, responsivity is focussed on moments of the for-what (Worauf), moments of surprise, those of preemption, of happenstance, of confrontations with the unfamiliar, of making claims, of recognizing (and of acknowledging) the autonomy of the Other, of thematizing an experience of the Alien in contrast to the experience of self. The lived body is more than just the subject and carrier of certain functions, which affects other lived bodies as objects and carriers of comparable functions. It is constitutively involved in all realms, and Waldenfels therefore relates these realms to a sphere of corporeality in order to elaborate to what extent corporeal behavior can be understood to be responsive. In addition, he describes various dimensions of corporeal responses—such as sensory functions (touching, seeing, hearing), motor functions, expression, and sexuality—and illustrates how in answering demands of their respective situations these are connected to a “corporeal responsorium,” which consists of various responsive registers. Waldenfels again cites the handshake as one of the registers belonging to the corporeal responsorium; he counts it, for instance, among the special ways of answering for bodily behavior, together with voice and look: hand into handshake is considered to be a corporeal phenomenon, yet not primarily as a body part or tool but as a register in which the occurrence of claim and response is rendered noticeable in a different way. Giving my hand already denotes that I am giving what does not belong to me alone. It has already been claimed by the Other, and I can only take a position by responding to them. It is with my hand that I give them part of my own lived body. With my handshake, I carry out a gesture of self-giving, and an act of mutual contact develops in the realm of touch in which the compression, whether forceful or frail, makes the recognition of various degrees of impression possible afterward, and which matches the voice or the look inasmuch as it is not any “property” or any “condition” but, rather, in that it is happening.31 In the sense of an act of “responsive hearing” or of “looking at,” this happening corresponds to an act of “touching on.” Waldenfels recognizes this dimension of the responsive, because we are giving what not only belongs to us, because it has already been claimed by the Other preemptively. What is revealed is the inalienable pathic dimension of experience, which represents a further feature of Waldenfels’s responsive phenomenology: his starts with pathos, with an experience that befalls us (Widerfahrnis), that touches me, that preempts me, that I am subjected to, that injures me, that challenges me. I experience something that is imposed on me.32 I am subjected to a claim that is removed from my control, one that is able to exceed my potential. I do not respond to something; rather, only in the act

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of responding does what affects me come to light as such. I and the Other, the Own and the Alien come out of the aforesaid intermediate occurrence—a happening that is grasped neither in a schematic of stimulus and response nor in the notion of cause and effect, for the effect comes in advance of the cause and refers to a gap for the impossible, as soon as it exceeds one’s own potential. Waldenfels describes this process in his Bruchlininen der Erfahrung (Faultlines of Experience, 2002) with the expression “diastasis,” which means literally an act of standing or stepping apart, referring to a process of differentiation in which what is distinguished only then emerges. Experience is shifted vis-à-vis itself “in the form of a precedence of that which affects us and of a subsequence of that with which we respond to it.”33 Thematizing responding—even in a corporeal sense as a fundamental trait for all human behavior and creation—his theory of responsivity anchored in the lived body is applied in the arts and media, in analyses of their aesthetics and ethics, in—for example—contextualizations going between theatre, dance, and film. Within Waldenfels’s concept of corporeality, in which both one’s own lived body and that of the alien are always involved, latitudes of particular and alien potentials open up; meanings shift even in the realms of dance, theatre, and film—sites of aesthetic as well as corporeal experience. According to Waldenfels, the by-what of being-affected (das Wovon des Getroffen-seins), which sets something in motion, and the to-what of responding (das Worauf des Antwortens), in which this something takes on shape and sense, are also found in the arts. They (also) shape experiences, for example, in dance as the art of bodily movement, where rhythms and techniques find their sustenance in capabilities for movement and in habits of motion, and where bodily movement experiences experimentation and intensification when performance occurs. It happens, moreover, in the theatre as an arena for the Alien, which portrays the Alien and lives on pathic stimuli. And in the cinema, too, a site of surprised perceptions and corporeal confusions, where seeing and hearing can vanish in breath-taking moments. The senses and arts interact, repositioned in an additional model for the in-between, in which the lived body functions as a transfer point. These experiences are also put on across the sensory spheres in threshold experiences, in which optic and acoustic phenomena, what is seen and what is heard, are not simply in the world but possess a kind of eventfulness (Ereignishaftigkeit), arising from becoming visible and audible. Here, too, alienness touches the senses; the latitude for one’s own potential is claimed, an Other appears and demands a response: “I designate what pushes into the foreground in this way as the pathic stimulus. In the beginning there is not anybody who acts on their own but, rather, somebody to whom something happens. In the beginning there is a patient, not an actor.”34 What befalls

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us in this ethical dimension is thus simultaneously older and younger than any lawmaking whatsoever already presupposed by moral subjects, and it is younger than any responsibility presupposing that we know and want, respectively, what we are doing. Waldenfels points out that, between the claim “that is put to us and the response with which we approach that which affects and appeals to us,” a realm opens up that “is occupied by aesthetic, technological, economic, and political intermediaries.”35 Ethical dimensions unfold by way of the receptiveness and attentiveness of the senses, by way of corporeal capacities in mobility and fragility; they come to pass where presence and absence are constantly enmeshing in each other, and where alienness to one’s own body is experienced in a challenging and incalculable way. In this way, Waldenfels develops an ethics from the Other’s point of view that, with its recourse to corporeal experiences, is revealed to be a phenomenological ethics.36 In its groundwork, this ethics thus underlies a practical test for phenomenology, too, which aids in refining its way of thinking and in clarifying its capacities for application.37 By way of key issues and points of controversy, then, phenomenology stands the test one step at a time, first of all with (1) its demonstrative thinking (aufweisendes Denken), which, as a special way of thinking and questioning, cannot be dominated by clarification of concepts, argumentation, and systematization from only one side. Instead, this manner is more about developing how it is about clarifying and not simply talking about something without realizing at the same time what is being discussed in each instance.38 Taking things themselves as a starting point also means recognizing that things themselves are what we start with whenever we talk about something. By way of Husserl and the beginning of the “pure,” “silent” experience—which first has to express its own meaning—and by way of Merleau-Ponty’s “paradox of expression”—which points out that “what is expressed linguistically or in any other way is at hand neither outside nor inside of language—we cross a threshold of silence which simultaneously connects and separates experience and expression.” That is to say, as Waldenfels puts forth, that language means more than language that is completed. For Waldenfels, rather, it refers to a prelanguage (Vor-Sprache), which first comes about in language: “What there is to say goes beyond what has already been said.”39 Aided by the English term aboutness, Waldenfels turns towards (2) intentionality, a “primal phenomenon” (“Urphänomen”), as part of which something matters to someone. “What this something is and who this someone is, is determined nowhere else than in the process of intentional experience.”40 Something appears as something to me, and the As (Als) functions in appearing as a kind of “turntable”; it “cannot be traced back to physical data, or mental acts, or laws of logic,” according to Waldenfels, but is filled with implications and bridges the gap between denoting and desiring, recognizing

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and acting. That is to say, for Waldenfels, that the appearance of something as something, in “significative difference” (“signifikativer Differenz”), corresponds to the aspiration of something in something, in “appetitive difference” (“appetitiver Differenz”).41 Both these differences contain a selective moment of the this way and not otherwise (so und nicht anders), rendering intentionality contingent. It is precisely in keeping with Husserl that we learn therefore to see with things like the pair of scissors. The As of intentionally making sense is stabilized, as Waldenfels continues, in (3) intermediate instances of media, as a consequence of which the That (Dass) and the What (Was) of experience is explored in the How (Wie) of its appearance. “The How that generates sense presents a modality that is distributed in changing ways for seeing, hearing, speaking, moving, acting, making, feeling, and coexisting.”42 Once again, it is in Husserl that the embodiment of these modes is enacted, on the one hand, as the sedimentation of sense (Sedimentierung von Sinn) and, on the other, as the habitualization of behaviors (Habitualisierung von Verhaltensweisen). In the context of (4) being a body and having a body as well as researching the brain (Leibkörper und Hirnforschung), the intermediate sphere of media (mediale Zwischensphäre) finds its support in the corporeality of our bodily Self, which is said to mark an “intersection” (“Kreuzungspunkt”), in that our own lived body (eigene Leib) indicates traits of an alien physical body (Fremdkörpers); such that we are therefore not only subject to an alien look and access, but that our lived body itself functions, in line with Husserl, as a “transfer point” between nature and culture, matter and mind, sense and force. The intersection, as Waldenfels elucidates, is one at which processes like socialization, politicization, and medicalization of the objective body set in; gender differentiation also has its site here. Brain research lags behind in this regard. Every alien observation and alien treatment plays out against a backdrop of a lifeworld. My living brain, the effects it has, belongs to my corporeality, without being freely accessible or permeable to me. “In contrast,” Waldenfels observes, “the brain as object of neurology denotes a methodologically and technologically produced construct.”43 He repositions the corporeal Self in (5) site, space, and time (Ort, Raum und Zeit), without which it would be Nobody, for it is in the Here and Now that I orient myself in the world, facing the challenge of a pluralization of space and time in the lifeworld (Lebenswelt); in the shared world (Mitwelt); in the space for hearing, seeing, and touching; in the space for acting; in social space; and in time—all of which are each otherwise in the act of perception, in discourse, in the rhythms of movement, or in the phases of development—everything phenomenally diverse. Waldenfels shifts the way of seeing, though, by suggesting a site for space (Ortsraum): “Whoever finds themselves at their site,

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appears in space to be at a place amongst others in space. . . . This corresponds to the duality of time that is lived and known as well as measure, of a feeling for time and of calendar time.”44 While the two aspects of site and time are not congruent, they do relate to one another and lead to a “shift of site and time”: “I am never entirely here and now but, rather, always also in former times and somewhere else.” The experience of site and time touches on the experience of the Alien; being an “internal difference of one’s own site and an alien site,” it cannot be obtained by any “external observation”: I is not just an Other; I is also some other place.45 The (6) experience of the Alien, ethics of the Other, and interculturality (Fremderfahrung, Ethik des Anderen und Interkulturalität) highlight the alienness of myself, of the Other, and of a different order: “Here we encounter a strangeness that results from the deviation from normal experience and is manifested in excesses of the ‘extra-ordinary.’ The latter are shown in the ritual of giving and forgiving as well as in the surge of eros or in outbreaks of hate and violence.”46 Especially in Levinas, according to Waldenfels, in this encounter the Other is a “troublemaker,” one who calls into question our normal orders as a result of their sheer existence, thus provoking defensive behavior and offering themselves as a victim of violence. Also in regard of this claim by the Other, according to Waldenfels, phenomenological ethics detects what goes beyond (das Jenseits) objectives and rules in the immutable events that we experience, in the mesh of the particular and the alien, in the in-between where interculturality is determined and where we switch from the sense-oriented move of intentionality, with its structures of objectives and rules, toward that which befalls us, to (7) pathos and response: “In order to visualize this transformation, we need a responsive reduction that goes above and beyond intentional reduction. Responses we give make sense and follow a rule, yet that does not apply to what we are responding to.”47 In the case of Waldenfels, responding stands for the aforesaid responsivity, which challenges intentionality and regularity for first place. Responding means to begin somewhere else. From this perspective Waldenfels asks whether phenomenology can be critical of society and politics, in relation to (8) normality and antagonism, and points to a kind of thinking and acting that what is alien manages to call into question, moving at the same time inside and outside of respective orders. Always found at the limits of normality, it “resists normalism—that is, a kind of normality that forgets its origin and closes the gap between the alien claim and one’s own design.”48 Phenomenological thinking oriented in this way, therefore, would not pretend to be satisfied with traditional forms of living and their normative

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monitoring. In its demonstrative thinking might lie, inasmuch as attainable, an act of resistance toward compulsory methods and forced normality, and even toward being lulled to sleep by its own tradition.

Chapter 6

Moments of the Ethical

In thinking of flesh, as the component and concrete emblem for a general manner of being (Seinsart), what matters to Maurice Merleau-Ponty is finding a constitutive milieu for this quantity amassed from the inside, which he then calls the flesh (le chair, in the original French). Central to this thinking is its point of departure from a reversibility between what is seeing and what is visible, what is touching and what is touched. To be sure, this reversibility is a kind that is always in the offing yet is in fact never realized. Merleau-Ponty clarifies his line of thought with the example of the subjective body, with his hands, and with his voice: “My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand touching the things, but I never reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at the moment of realization, and one of two things always occurs: either my right hand really passes over to the rank of touched, but then its hold on the world is interrupted; or it retains its hold on the world, but then I do not really touch it—my right hand touching, I palpate with my left hand only its outer covering. Likewise, I do not hear myself as I hear the others, the sonorous existence of my voice is for me as it were poorly exhibited; I have rather an echo of its articulated existence, it vibrates through my head rather than outside.”1 Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that there is always an interruption underway and thus no symmetry, for instance, in the handshake or in the auditory canal. The hiatus interrupts them and, as a result, also the reversibility of what is hearing with what is heard. Identity is constantly missed. No complete congruence takes place but, rather, constant motion and deviation, as part of which an intermediate sphere (Zwischensphäre) gains in significance, in which the lived body functions as a site of transfer for the movement between what is touching and what is touched, between what is hearing and what is heard. At this transfer point, what is subsequently involved is thinking as well of what cannot be touched, heard, and seen—in a deviating motion towards the Other, too. “But this hiatus between my right hand touched and my right hand touching, between my voice heard and my voice uttered, between one moment of my tactile life and the following one, 89

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is not an ontological void, a non-being: it is spanned by the total being of my body, and by that of the world; it is the zero of pressure between two solids that makes them adhere to one another.”2 In a working note from November 1960—which Merleau-Ponty heads with the title “The Other”—is written what thinking of the Other comes down to (for him). What matters is not any “expedient to solve the ‘problem of the other,’” but is instead a “transformation” of this problem, which arrives at a new “idea” of “subjectivity,” taking what is visible and vision, what is sensible and sensing, as its point of departure: “there are no longer ‘syntheses,’ there is a contact with being through its modulations, or its reliefs—The other is no longer so much a freedom seen from without as destiny and fatality, a rival subject for a subject, but he is caught up in a circuit that connects him to the world, as we ourselves are, and consequently also in a circuit that connects him to us—And this world is common to us, is intermundane space— And there is transitivism by way of generality—And even freedom has its generality, is understood as generality: activity is no longer the contrary of passivity.”3 In this way, Merleau-Ponty thinks through corporeal relationships in the sense of an embracing (Umschlingens), of an encroaching within a circuit, from my lived body to your lived body and back, and from the lived body of the third person to that of the neighbor and back, as part of which each of our bodies are common to all of us. Merleau-Ponty’s thinking of the Other, therefore, is one that is subjected to the claim of the Other, taking it up in order to put forward commonalities with this assimilation, taking it up into the circuit of the world, integrating it, bringing it along into an entangling (Ineinander), putting it into a commonality that also brings it forth. Included, too, is sexuality, which is comprehended as what is lived, in that the sexual is grasped in a sensory way in which we live this relationship to Others.4 “What do I bring to the problem of the same and the other? This: that the same be the other than the other, and identity difference of difference—this 1) does not realize a surpassing, a dialectic in the Hegelian sense; 2) is realized on the spot, by encroachment, thickness, spatiality—.”5 In other words, this world that we are born into is not our world; it is an open, undivided social intermediate world in which our own yet also other, alien perspectives and claims wait for us, exist, and are brought forth. “Whence the essential problem = not to make common in the sense of creation ex nihilo of a common situation, of a common event plus engagement by reason of the past, but in the sense of uttering language—”6 This way is how Merleau-Ponty speaks of the Other, transforms language, alters the direction we look, goes from outside the circuit into its interior, and along with us puts into focus the sensibility of the objective body in exploring this world based on our bodily existence within structures of Being,

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schematically deepening thoughts toward an ontology of carnal presence. These thoughts lead him, in line with Husserl, toward the horizon, a new type of Being. Thus, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the porosity, pregnancy, or generality; “and he before whom the horizon opens is caught up, included within it. His body and the distances participate in one same corporeity or visibility in general, which reigns between them and it, and even beyond the horizon, beneath his skin, unto the depths of being.”7 Here is precisely where the Other is to be situated, at and beyond the horizon; they are “a relief as I am, not absolute vertical existence.”8 The Other appears, enters the foreground, retreats into the background, and they are in each case connected to us, though not in any absolute act of positing but, rather, in their carnal presence. As part of his philosophical inquiry into the visible and nature, amidst flesh and world, Merleau-Ponty runs up against the horizon of things, as he writes, up against “the most difficult point, that is, the bond between the flesh and the idea, between the visible and the interior armature which it manifests and which it conceals.”9 Human existence, lived and lived through physically (gelebt and erlebt) is found in an in-between realm (Zwischenbereich) of world and consciousness. My lived body is in the visible. That also means, for example, not just that it is a piece of what is visible, in the sense that the visible is there and that “here (as variant of the there) is my body”—as described by Merleau-Ponty in an additional working note from December 1960, titled “The body in the world. The specular image—resemblance.”10 Instead, it is more about being hemmed in by the visible, which is not enacted on any plane where it would be an inlay; “it is really surrounded, circumvented. This means: it sees itself, it is a visible—but it sees itself seeing, my look which finds it there knows that it is here, at its own side.”11 In this way, according to Merleau-Ponty, the lived body stands before the world and the world before it, and between the two there exists a relation of embrace, between both vertical Beings there is no border but a plane for contact. Thus, in the specular image of the lived body the flesh is shown, the fact that my body is active and passive, visible and seeing, simultaneously a massed quantity in itself and a gesture. The flesh is shown to the world, its horizontality (Horizonthaftigkeit, i.e., interior and exterior horizon) “surrounding the thin pellicle of the strict visible between these two horizons.”12 The flesh is shown as “the fact that the visible that I am is seer (look) or, what amounts to the same thing, has an inside, plus the fact that the exterior visible is also seen, i.e., has a prolongation, in the enclosure of my body, which is part of its being.”13 In the process, the thing’s specular image, memory, and resemblance are fundamental structures, which are derived immediately from the relationship between the lived body and the world—“the reflections resemble the reflected = the vision commences in the things, certain things or couples of things call for vision—Show that

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our whole expression and conceptualization of the mind is derived from these structures: for example reflection.”14 Everything that exists in this space of horizontality is incomplete, because it is always realized in concrete, corporeal experience, in a constant state of synthesis: I do not think the world; I live it. My ideas of the world can only be there in my carnal experience as ideas. Every idea is in this regard not the opposite of the sensory but, rather, “its lining and its depth,”15 My thinking is grounded in perceiving and cannot be separated from my corporeal experience, which I do not posit in any way as absolute or cannot ever understand to be completed, for I am open to the world. I communicate with it, to be sure, yet I can never possess it and so it remains inexhaustible to me. It is precisely this openness, this opening to the world—in and with which concepts of corporeality are differentiated—that occupies the works in line with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, whether in studies on cultures of corporeality or in writings on raw perception, on the experience of creation, and on open reality.16 To all appearances, what the present occupations with Merleau-Ponty have in common is the search for moments of the ethical—moments that in his ontologization of the lived body uncover traces of a kind of thinking that no longer posits the Other in categories of Being but gives the Other unconditional priority instead. The Other is posited in their singularity and demands this priority: not as the image of my thought but in corporeally situated difference. In this way, and in line with Merleau-Ponty, the question regarding aesthetics arises otherwise: as asking about the conditions for perception, for the connection between an apparent interior world (that of a subject) and an apparent exterior world (that of things, technology, nature, and other persons). It points far beyond the horizon of purely artistic evaluation, as well as beyond visual/fixating recognition, toward living, corporeal/ linguistic references. In questioning what conditions perception, therefore, not only the constructed nature of something as something becomes visible; at the same time, spaces for potential can be opened up, which thematize other forms of relationships. In these fundamental determinations of relationships, “the” human being loses its definite article and thus its identifying and generalizing position in a “world around them” that is “alien” to them. This manner of determining aesthetics moves it into proximity with aisthesis and does not connect either of them, not in any inquiry into the true, the good, and the beautiful or in any abandoning of verity. Instead, it rehabilitates the concepts in their signification of perceiving and being aware (Wahrnehmen) and of becoming aware (Gewahr-werden). As opposed to any primacy of the visual and any determination of the essence of humankind through the logos, this aesthetics recognizes (and acknowledges), similarly in keeping with Merleau-Ponty, a basic corporeality of perception as Belonging-to-the-world

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(Zur-Welt-Sein). This Being-embedded (Eingelassen-Sein) in relationships denotes a fundamentally relational determination of the subject as an entity that cannot be fixed. Being conscious and being sensory are not realms that can be dichotomously delimited from one another. Being conscious is already always immersed in being sensory.17 It is this broad formulation of an aisthetic understanding that not only connects it inevitably with ethics but also makes it into an ethics. It amounts to a new version of ethics insofar as this thinking blocks the creation of self-contained constructs and entities, thus addressing the life praxis of each one that is invoked to be uncontainable.18 The daily challenge of situating is what is meant in this regard—what it means to become aware of the manifold ways of communicating, conveying, and affecting, which simply render a subject impossible as something unique/original and instead make it manifest as a result of praxes and collective references. This way of seeing connects sense and sensory nature in a chiasm, in which thinking of references and their linguistic reenactment mimetically appear to approximate the complexity of relationships and challenge traditional forms of speech. “Reversibility: the finger of the glove that is turned inside out—There is no need of a spectator who would be on each side. It suffices that from one side I see the wrong side of the glove that is applied to the right side, that I touch the one through the other (double ‘representation’ of a point or plane of the field) the chiasm is that: the reversibility.” Only through reversibility is there a transition from “for oneself” to “for Others”: “In reality there is neither me nor the other as positive, positive subjectivities. There are two caverns, two opennesses, two stages where something will take place—and which both belong to the same world, to the stage of Being.”19 There is neither the “for oneself” nor the “for Others.” The one is the reverse of the Other. “This is why they incorporate one another: projection-introjection—There is that line, that frontier surface at some distance before me, where occurs the veering I-Other Other-I—The axis alone given—the end of the finger of the glove is nothingness—but a nothingness one can turn over, and where then one sees things—The only ‘place’ where the negative would really be is the fold, the application of the inside and the outside to one another, the turning point [which is the lived body]— Chiasm

I—the world I—the other—

chiasm my body—the things, realized by the doubling up of my body into inside and outside—and the doubling up of the things (their inside and their outside)” as well as the doubling up of other bodies (their inside and their outside: The chiasm I—my body.20 The idea of the chiasm thus states that

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every relationship to Being is simultaneously a seizing as well as a being seized; “the hold is held, it is inscribed and inscribed in the same being that it takes hold of.”21 It is necessary to take Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the visible and the invisible precisely at its word, to differentiate it as a kind of thinking that invokes corporeal experience, which at the same time is one of seizing and of the one who seizes: “Starting from there, elaborate an idea of philosophy: it can not be total and active grasp, intellectual possession, since what there is to be grasped is a dispossession.”22 Therefore, this philosophy is not found on top of life, as an overhang; instead, it is to be established much more underneath, on the plane of experience. “What it says, its significations, are not absolutely invisible: it shows by words. Like all literature. It does not install itself in the reverse of the visible: it is on both sides.”23 In this respect, Merleau-Ponty posits no absolute difference between philosophy, or the transcendental, and the empirical, or the ontological and the ontic, as the case may be. He speaks for not using any absolutely, purely philosophical word. Similarly, he stands for not doing any purely philosophical politics, no purely philosophical rigorism, for example, as far as any manifesto goes. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the visible and the invisible thus turns into one that is in the world and belongs to the world; it is the unconditional groundwork for a kind of phenomenological thinking, out of which an ethics of alterity becomes possible. 6.1 RAW PERCEPTION In her book Merleau-Pontys Weg zur Welt der rohen Wahrnehmung (Merleau-Ponty’s Way Towards the World of Raw Perception), Anna Orlikowski addresses the riddle of visibility, which always also includes something invisible and, according to her thesis, functions as the reverse of a world oriented toward presence. In doing so, her primary source is MerleauPonty’s unfinished later work, The Visible and the Invisible, which she takes as a point of departure for tracing developments of a phenomonology of perception in five chapters: in (I) Structures of phenomenality, (II) Origins of truth, (III) Ontological projections from the background, (IV) Vertical world, and (V) Phenomenology of the invisible. How is thinking about phenomena oriented, and how can subjectivity be thought? Orlikowski calls into question the role of the subject, constitutive performance, extrapolating the world against the backdrop of both corporeal and passive experience as well as unconscious processes. In line with Merleau-Ponty, these inquiries open up new ways of accessing reality, which are grounded in his final writings on the sensory nature of the flesh.

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In Orlikowski’s Preamble, which affords a look into Merleau-Ponty’s work, his understanding of phenomenology is conceived as a move from the very beginning. As such, it has yet to reach any self-contained consciousness in any way, though instead poses the question as to accessing phenomena and nonphenomena to be an inquiry that is open and, in fact, uncontainable, especially in regard of any determination of the relationship between the visible and the invisible. Orlikowski considers Merleau-Ponty’s critical position (Auseinandersetzung) toward art, most prominently toward painting, in which establishing any metaphysics of art matters less to Merleau-Ponty than pursuing an interest in the “primacy of the experience of perception itself or, as the case may be, in seeing itself, so as to discover in it a structure for Being and for ourselves.”24 Subsequently, then, the first part involves structures for rendering things visible, treated via paradigms of painting, as a result of which the second part discusses impossibilities for complete reduction, which in the third part prepare for models of thought like “flesh,” “tissue,” “chiasm,” “reversibility,” and “projection.” These devices are introduced in the effects they have acting together, such that the fourth part further takes up thematizations of the depth dimension, the unconscious, and the topological perspective which, in the concluding fifth part, attempt to find a way through to the invisible in Merleau-Ponty’s work, using the experience of transcendence as a guide. The dimensions of absence belong to the visible world as well.25 In this way, there are transcendent traits inherent in what is invisible in something visible: “It is the invisible of this world.”26 In this way, in sensory experience both the visible and the invisible are always already presupposed as having been structured, articulated, shaped, and organized. Merleau-Ponty anchors them in his phenomenology of perception, in laying the groundwork for his theory of the lived body, and shows them to be “living connections.”27 For me, the world with its objects is a given; experiencing and perceiving, I dive into the density of the world; the thing is already present; I comprehend it in its perspectival appearance, which is disclosed to me. Categories like cause, effect, means, ends, matter and form, stimulus and response are insufficient for comprehending this relationship of my life toward object and world, as well as the manner and way in which what is visible interlaces with the invisible. In my Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-Sein) and Belonging-to-the-world (Zur-Welt-Sein), it is precisely perspective that makes recognition possible. In the process, elements, objects, objective bodies do not stand for themselves individually but are instead determined in a totality as a result of the positions they take toward one another in the visual field, in chiastic positions outside one another (i.e., critical analyses: Auseinander-Setzungen), in actual engagement, in addition to both in and with the image. In this framework,

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what is visible effects and occasions perception without determining it, while giving it perspective, to be sure, as well as opening up latitudes for potential of seeing. Orlikowski draws attention, in particular, to the fact that Merleau-Ponty sees the Other, too, within the latitudes for potential of seeing, bears them in mind as well, namely, in the direction of an indirect intersubjectivity, “where the relationship to the Other is understood in the sense of the reverse and stands out as a result of belonging to the same world and the same Being.”28 Doing so, there is no thinking of opposites between the One and the Other, no rivalry any longer, but instead a kind of thinking that is able to preserve the otherness of the Other: the One is the reverse of the Other. The Other incorporates another access to the same Being on the basis of corporeal preconditions. Thus, the perspective of the Other cannot be occupied yet appears to be “practicable by right,” as Merleau-Ponty points out in The Visible and the Invisible.29 Consequently, Merleau-Ponty highlights the ground for the predefined corporeality to be commonly pursued, whereby “phenomena like intercorporeality, intertwining, and chiasm are able to build a framework,” as Orlikowski writes, “that makes any indirect or vertical intersubjectivity possible in the first place.”30 Merleau-Ponty’s access to the Other succeeds as a result of a lateral way of approaching, as part of which the proximity to the Other subverts the cleft with them. “The possibility of practicability brought into play here involves a mode of access that is never realized because of the hiatus in the chiasm. The aspired proximity consequently does not lead to any fusion but, by way of modulations and projections, a reversible process occurs instead, in which a crisscrossing of planes is made possible by way of disruption and diversion.”31 As a result, Orlikowski says that an intersubjective gap arises where emphasizing takes place, which supposedly counteracts any flattening of otherness in the overall tissue of the flesh. It is in this sense, according to Merleau-Ponty, that the Other is a projection, and the relationship to the Other is manifested therefore in a process of detachment in which “the same [is] the other than the other” or that “identity [is] difference of difference.”32 The Other is a phenomenon amongst others. The move or leap across from the sensory to the sensible takes shape, as Orlikowski points out, “in the mode of a creative process that, with the exception of an unnameable excess, brings forth additional value to meaning. This transformation is understood in the sense of an autodynamics without any creator,” just as the “authority of subjectivity was transformed into a ‘consciousness without any inhabitants.’”33 With these forms of desubjectivization, Orlikowski inquires into the ethical dimensions in Merleau-Ponty’s later work and harbors the suspicion that it is precisely in the intersubjective

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encounter that ethics is forfeited, in which the lived body, flesh, and the flesh of the world mix with one another, repositioning this encounter into the mode of generality, into an indeterminate in-between (ein unbestimmtes Zwischen).34 First of all, in relocating the intersubjective relationship into an indeterminate in-between, Orlikowski sees a weakening of the ethos. Even so, in Merleau-Ponty’s perceiving experience of the Alien there are supposedly still ethically relevant structures at work, which assign for thought an ongoing “situating in a field of encountering.” The fact that we ourselves as well as Others have ever been inscribed into the world would subvert “the objectivizing constitution in favour of an altered optic that reveals a multidimensional/ polymorphous relationship framework.”35 Orlikowski’s thinking on “revitalizing and reshaping intermediate spaces” on this side of the normative forces in Merleau-Ponty is full of insight. “Because the intersubjective coincidence of normative aspects of morality, religion, and obligation remains exonerated, an immediate, ethical expression can come to light, one that arises beyond thoughts of status and authority, and which can reveal the core of a relationship shaped in an original way.”36 6.2 THE EXPERIENCE OF CREATION In his study Merleau-Ponty und die Erfahrung der Schöpfung (originally published in French as Merleau-Ponty et l’expérience de la création [2005]), Alessandro Delcò takes up the topic of creation (la création), which is not addressed directly in Merleau-Ponty’s work. It pushes indirectly into the foreground time and again at central junctures consistently, however, in that it is obliged to search inquiringly, following a kind of thinking that would take steps into the invisible: How does a form arise? How does a world open up out of what is undetermined? How is many-layered, manifold experience thinkable? Delcò enacts this search in a move made against the backdrop of four domains: (1) nature, (2) history, (3) language, and (4) art. His pursuit links creation back to experience in order to highlight that in, and in line with, Merleau-Ponty, looking for unequivocal theses on the subject, much less any system for creative Being, cannot be involved. What is attempted, rather, is to investigate the experience of creation (l’expérience de la création) from the scarcely understandable side of thinking the visible and the invisible. This kind of thinking throughout Merleau-Ponty’s entire work interests Delcò, and in his very instructive introduction to it, he determines a twofold difficulty. It lies in the fact, on the one hand, that only indications can be read from it, since any positively determined concepts for creation, or about

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creation whatsoever, are lacking in the texts. This difficulty also makes clear, on the other hand, that precisely these indications in their manifold nature refuse any systematizing whatsoever. As readers of Merleau-Ponty, then, we have to accept that his cues on creation are to be found between the lines. In this way, Delcò establishes his own way of reading, which extends throughout his book and is sustained through its expansion onto other areas of experience, so as to describe creation in various ways, in recognizing (and acknowledging) its various modes, which “sometimes bring forth something new, yet sometimes correspond to the broadly scattered moments of their emergence.”37 From the very start, Delcò seeks out forms of creation, which may change according to their respective domains, depending on certain resistances and structural constraints, and which in the first pages are also sought (out) by artists in the process of taking shape: in an observation made early on, it is the painter Paul Klee who inspires Delcò to contemplate creation further. That is, he thinks it to be primarily a genesis of acts, which “issues from a correspondence with the hidden source of primordial forces.”38 In an initial step, by way of Merleau-Ponty, Delcò subsequently emphasizes the sphere of nature and focuses on exemplary traits for the potency of procreation, growth, innateness, rootedness, and unconscious vitality. From these features he is able to get to the experiential ground (Erfahrungsboden) for nature: a ground that is original, from which creative, natural acts of humankind issue, though not exclusively, for there are also creative cultural acts that both of them, Merleau-Ponty and Delcò, have in mind.39 Here, together with Merleau-Ponty, Delcò launches a second step, for the original ground (Ursprungsboden) of every person has a history; every creation results from a praxis, in which contingency and rationality are interlaced with each other, on the one hand, and in which history as a history of Being (Seinsgeschichte) can develop, on the other hand, eluding our will and understanding. In the domain of language, in the third step, a comparable, double move is enacted: only in working on speaking words (la parole parlante) do we arrive at spoken words (la parole parlée), in other words, at our own speech, which always results by way of a historic route that is lined with Others, too. From there, the fourth step toward art is likewise one enacted doubly: art is a matter of expression, demands an active activity, a producing, which in turn is only possible against the backdrop of what is visible, what is present. In this way, Delcò takes every step in lockstep with Merleau-Ponty; everything comes to us from the outside; we find ourselves in a world of expression, in which the phenomenological efforts of these authors purpose to illuminate the sensory world, “inasmuch as it is the original ground for all possible experience and truth,” as Delcò puts it, whereby Merleau-Ponty never loses sight of the domain of the cultural framework.40

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At this juncture, Delcò makes the case for reading Merleau-Ponty in light of a concept used occasionally by him, resumption (la reprise). It takes up what is given, transforms it, restructures it, keeps pushing it forward; and it also discovers it again, distorts and pursues it further, begins anew, repeats; and, at the same time, restrains, reshapes, straightens out, recreates. This resumption is a polyvalent gesture, which “by force of a decision or particular intention brings an essential modification into what was existing before.”41 Things arise on the ground of historicity; in this case, resumption is at work. In nature, in contrast, it only occurs by chance, coincidentally; in that case, blind spontaneity prevails, eluding intentional dimensions. Questioning Merleau-Ponty’s particular manner of creating, Delcò traces his thinking of Being (Seinsdenken). Although Being may not be comprehended with the efficiency of an act of doing, creation is present in Being in its own way. According to Merleau-Ponty, creation happens as a result of Being’s self-propulsion, which brings a division along with it. This division, according to Delcò, inscribes a form of generativity and, therefore, he would not pursue it with the concept of resumption in this case but, rather, would implement it as well with the concept of transubstantiation (Wesensverwandlung). For Delcò, determining philosophy to be ontology and phenomenology à la Merleau-Ponty requires “searching for a logos, which understands how to express—and perhaps even explicate—the original phenomenality of Being. [. . .] The logos does not reflect Being. It attempts, more modestly, to be attuned to it. Being is the silence that declares itself; speech must ‘accord’ (correspondre) with it. Taking silence as its starting point, speech must precisely speak the language of this silence.”42 It is here that Delcò launches his critical observation for the phenomenological modus operandi. What he subsequently names the “absolute madness of philosophical discourse” is the presumptuousness of the logos in spite of and contrary to the already contemplated ethical implication of correspondence in wanting to speak an absolute language of silence. Time and again, the wish, the yearning prevails, wanting to claim an ultimate ground and also to make pronouncements in it. Merleau-Ponty dares to take the way “for comprehending, in the muteness of pre-linguistic modes of expression, the schematics for language in the proper sense.”43 Delcò poses the decisive question as to whether this articulation is not already a betrayal of what one is attempting to comprehend by means of language. Drawing closer to an absence, regardless of in what way, means touching this absence as absence and being connected with absence. What language does one have to speak in order to talk of the birth of language itself (of language before any language)?44 The logos always pushes, as it were, into the proximity of an absolute without logos. And yet, is it not precisely the logos that first constructs an absolute for itself without itself, as the principle of a world organizing itself according to laws, as an

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aspect of order? Is it not what necessarily introduces a countersite (Gegenort) of quiet? It is senseless to think of a silence before the logos and without the logos. These are preserved as such precisely in their tension; they are entirely unthinkable as pure forms. Following Merleau-Ponty, then, Delcò further inquires: Can the logos, which is of course the power of moving things into the distance, distance itself in order to leave the word to the things themselves?45 This question, which can be put into the service of an ethics of things, still testifies, however, to the originating activity of the logos. The power to effect begins with it and opens up the space for things to unfold and have a voice in the very first place. Yet is there not already a particular language or voice of things? Are they dependent on our leaving our word to them? Or would a gesture be equally thinkable, one that describes our Belonging-to-the-world (Zur-Welt-Sein) anew, as one of active and passive listening (Zu-Hören und Hin-Hören), opening it up to experiences that are on this side of any particular capability? Attaining a language before language would still be coopting the diverse nature of expressions by humankind. Inquiries into a kind of prelinguisticality, therefore, can only aim for an expansion of linguistic understanding as one that is corporeal/ living. In his expositions on “Dialogue and the Perception of the Other,” in the context of living speech (lebendiger Rede) in The Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty remarks: “We shall completely understand this trespass of things upon their meaning, this discontinuity of knowledge which is at its highest point in speech, only when we understand it as the trespass of oneself upon the other and of the other upon me.”46 Merleau-Ponty would like to understand the force of living speech and for doing so enters into the dialogue, though not before he has produced a “silent relationship” to the Other: “It is not sufficiently noted that the other is never present face to face. Even when, in the heat of discussion, I directly confront my adversary, it is not in that violent face with its grimace, or even in that voice traveling toward me, that the intention which reaches me is to be found. The adversary is never quite localized; his voice, his gesticulations, his twitches, are only effects, a sort of stage effect, a ceremony.”47 To be sure, the Other’s lived body is before me, yet he himself leads a peculiar existence (Dasein): “between I who think and that body, or rather near me, by my side. The other’s body is a kind of replica of myself, a wandering double which haunts my surroundings more than it appears in them. The other’s body is the unexpected response I get from elsewhere.”48 The Other surprises me, moves before my eyes and thus always on the edge of what I see and hear; they are at my side; they stand besides me or behind me; they are “not in that place which my look flattens and empties of any ‘interior.’”49 In other words, every Other is an other I. The Other is my doppelgänger, and with their speech they

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become a complete present for themselves. Following Merleau-Ponty, at this juncture Delcò puts forward that the transition to verbal communication is indeed enacted in a certain continuity of the perceiving relationship, but that speech still has the force to unblock another dimension, the cultural space.50 From this point in time forward, therefore, speech is subjected de jure to an unbounded resumption that allows more and more for unveiling the same “existentialia.”51 In dialogue with the Other, I project myself into them and thus into their world, through to my expropriation, as part of which I can never entirely resituate the Other. And yet I find myself again in them as a result of their unforeseeable response, just as they in some way find themselves again in me through the swirl of speech. I am reflected in dialogue with the Other without being aware of it; I reflect on them, so to speak. Their speech draws me into their trajectory, if not into their trance; it touches me in my selfness. Through the (dis)course of words, I share the world with Others, and this reciprocity, this Merging-into-each-other (Ineinander-Schlagen) of our lives, expands for both of us the sense of our experience. A strangely singular “synthesis,” as Delcò explains, for I am depersonalized and at the same time someone else is no longer the Other separated metaphysically from me: “Suddenly, thanks to spoken words, I transition into someone else, and someone else passes over into me. We no longer occupy two antagonistic worlds but are instead two persons who encounter each other.”52 Taken a step further, this encounter, enacted in dialogue, means that I achieve the alterity of the other as a result of speech, through the mediation of speech. Speech decenters me, in fact, to the extent that someone else is able to plug into me. In line with Merleau-Ponty, Delcò concludes that “the conquest of sense cannot be a lonely adventure in any case, even if dialogue never fills the abyss that every I is for themselves and for Others.”53 6.3 OPEN REALITY In his sizeable tome titled Identität in einer offenen Wirklichkeit: eine Spurensuche im Anschluss an Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur und Waldenfels (Identity in an Open Reality: Seeking Traces Connected with Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur, and Waldenfels), Frank Vogelsang pursues questions about human identity, which he establishes as being interwoven, as in a dynamic, because as corporeal beings we are always already oriented toward and connected to the reality surrounding us as well as the Others living with us. We are never entirely by ourselves; what is particular to us and what is alien cannot be separated. Vogelsang offers a phenomenological analysis that sets out that being connected belongs just as much to our identity as being separated.

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Making his argument using the work of Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur, and Waldenfels, Vogelsang carries out his analysis in three main chapters, in which he elaborates the identity of the lived body as intercorporeality as well as the corporeal existence in an open reality, so as to arrive at traces of identity in the ways in which reality appears. Taking the question “Who am I?” as the point of departure, Vogelsang develops a line of inquiry that he begins first of all in the day-to-day world and in the sciences: identity is found in the tense interplay of question and answer. In the day-to-day, the question about the way to the train station can be answered in relation to the order of streets. In the sciences, in contrast, any questioning is in the first place an open process endeavoring to make systems in our own subject domain recognizable in general. Existing orders are replaced by new systems, during which there are transitions, continuities, in which the new orders are still connected with the old ones, as in the transformation rules for the theory of relativity. By comparison, however, the question “Who am I?” occupies a unique position because, different to the everyday and to the sciences, it cannot be connected with any order that would not depend on it. It not only aims at our identity, but it also always expresses our identity at the same time. The question is part of the move that would ground it; its “existential bond causes a dismissal vis-à-vis all existing orders,” from which, for Vogelsang, duties and imperatives result for constantly reorienting ourselves, because for human beings there is no order “in which we have been always already firmly integrated.”54 All attempts to determine identity are thus doomed to failure. The answer to identity does not exist independently of the inquiry into it. There is no mediating order; question and answer are irresolvably interlaced with each other. Our interwoven nature with other persons is a condition by way of which questions of identity are posed. It raises the fundamental question, then, as to how alterity can be thought in line with Merleau-Ponty. In his reading, Waldenfels proposes further thinking through the role of the lived body. “Assuming that the lived body takes on ethical features does not suffice; conversely, rather, the ethos proves to be carnal ethos.”55 The tense interplay between question and answer is one that is integrated in relationships of alterity, as Vogelsang further puts forward: We would know who we are and, at the same time, we think we know who we are. We want to come to an awareness of ourselves and, at the same time, we want to become like Others. We are always already some who, and at the same time we believe that who we are will not be become manifest until the future.56 In distinction to the riddle we can solve, these descriptions show the mystery of human existence, which cannot be revealed; instead, we can only come to learn to deal with it, a process that can appeal to partial areas of knowledge that do, however, oppose fundamental not-knowing. Here is where Vogelsang initiates his approach, for he repositions contemplation about the mysteries of

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human existence to where it belongs in the day-to-day reality, which does not need to be objectified, but where instead relationships appear that are differentiated by way of the conditions of corporeal existence and its experiences. In this sense, Vogelsang begins with the identity of the lived, subjective body: “The subjective body (Leib) refuses any complete integration into orders like the order of consciousness, for example, or that of the objective body (Körper). This is not because it would belong to, say, none of these orders but, rather, because it has a share in all of them; it is informed by these divergent orders. Moreover, it belongs right in the middle of a sphere that is without shape and difficult to illuminate, between what classical epistemology has distinguished as subject and object.”57 The subjective body comprehends the fact that the objective body possesses awareness, that it is connected to mental faculties. The subjective body is not to be observed in isolation; it cannot be understood as something individualized; rather, it coexists with other persons, who from the very beginning are to be taken into consideration as well. Although I encounter the lived, subjective body of another person as a clearly delimited objective body, at the same time I still intuit that this objective body senses itself in exactly the same way, and that it thinks in a comparable way, the way I experience myself. The objective body of the Other is not something completely Other; we are always already coming from an intimate knowledge of their existence; we never encounter another human being as altogether Alien. I can only understand this encountering objective body as one aspect of the corporeal existence of the Other.58 They are also connected constitutively with my corporeal existence. In keeping with Merleau-Ponty, Vogelsang arrives at the spheres of intercorporeality (Zwischenleiblichkeit), in which the lived body leads beyond the orders of subject and object, all the way to the spheres between the I and the Other.59 A space for intercorporeality opens up in which ownness intertwines with alienness, and in which the individual is not simply part of the whole— like a family, for instance, or a nation—but in which they have something particular that still is set apart from the Alien. In this space, the lived body is a dynamic quantity oriented toward the world and Others, and it can only be understood if the constant mediation it performs between me and the world, between me and Others, is taken into consideration. The lived body can be comprehended only as it belongs to the world: What does it mean to bring the Other into the conception of my perception? How can we think of the specific relationship of the lived body to the Other? Vogelsang determines that the Other does not acquire any separate place ascribed to them in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, whereas the lived body and the world occupy prominent positions. Contrary to initially supposing a repression or minimization of the meaning of the Other, it becomes clear that in Merleau-Ponty our corporeal Belonging-to-the-world

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(Zur-Welt-Sein) is not thinkable without the Other. His understanding of the lived body is in no way one that is unilinearly directed toward the world, starting with me, but one that instead already contains the Other as an internal, constitutive relationship. The form of thematizing already points to the position of the Other: the reflexive analysis, taking a rational I as its point of departure, is not its site. Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s entire phenomenological understanding turns against the stronghold of a solipsistic ego and thereby against constructions of a relationship as one of an opposite, which already entails hierarchy. The individual’s uncontainability, their own constitutive alienness, is the potential for coexisting with Others. The corporeal I leads to another Self. The basic gesture is one that provides space for the Other in the weakness of determining the I. In backing away from an I that coincides with its consciousness, the corporeal connectedness with the world and with others becomes centrally positioned. Vogelsang cites Merleau-Ponty: “Between my consciousness and my body as I experience it, between this phenomenal body of mine and that of another as I see it from the outside, there exists an internal relation which causes the other to appear as the completion of the system. The possibility of an other person’s being self-evident is owed to the fact that I am not transparent for myself, and that my subjectivity draws its body in its wake.”60 However they be sorted, the Other is not any supplement to a system. Before each precise dividing line, the Other and I are put into one (common) original generality.61 For Vogelsang, thinking of “having one and the same origin” (Gleichursprünglichkeit) for both our “own” and “alien” observation characterizes a central position in Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the lived body. These two observations, Merleau-Ponty’s as well as Vogelsang’s, go above and beyond any simple primary positioning of the alien Other, coupled with any singular responsibility or dependency: even I experience myself as alien, just as this I is an Alien for Others. There is no constitutive moment within corporeal Being that precedes the encounter with the Other; there is no site of pure Being-by-itself (bei-sich-Sein) any longer. “Thus we can conclude that human beings only come to an awareness of themselves when they know how to be simultaneously connected to the Other in the most intimate way.”62 In his critical analysis of Merleau-Ponty, Vogelsang emphasizes the significance of the Other in the living relation to the world: “The lived body can only be understood if we recognize not only our always given relatedness to the world but also our always already given relatedness to the Other. Both of them, the world and the Other, are constitutive for determining the lived body.”63 We then arrive at the difficulty of acknowledging the other person not only as another person but also always as an Other. This conterminous double move possesses the strength for going above and beyond dialectic sublations

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of differences, as well as for grasping precisely these differences to be dynamic and corporeal/performative. In such a broadening of perspective, differences are more than negative delimitations and distinguishing features. Instead, as mutable relations they constitute the basis for a kind of expanded responsibility. In this case, identity is not a dichotomous opposite to difference. Rather, it is fundamentally determined by a diversity of differences that connect “internal” and “external” lived experiences with one another. Asking about the construction of individual as well as collective identity, then, is both an ongoing and a critical project, which does not challenge our social reality with the question of who we are but, rather, how we act. Connected to this inquiry is to ask, à la Merleau-Ponty, how I am doubled, how I am decentered. For experiencing the Other is also always an experience of the rejoinder from me and a rejoinder to me. The mystery of the Other is nothing other than the mystery of myself. In the encounter, it is an act of joining together (Ineinanderfügung) with Others. Regarding an exemplary encounter with the Other, about one ethical moment, Merleau-Ponty writes: “I am watching this man who is motionless in sleep and suddenly he wakes. He opens his eyes. He makes a move toward his hat, which has fallen beside him, and picks it up to protect himself from the sun. What finally convinces me that my sun is the same as his, that he sees and feels it as I do, and that after all there are two of us perceiving the world, is precisely that which, at first, prevented me from conceiving the other—namely, that his body belongs among my objects, that it is one of them, that it appears in my world.”64 Merleau-Ponty continues this description of an experience of the Other, by noting that “[w]hen the man asleep in the midst of my objects begins to make gestures toward them, to make use of them, I cannot doubt for a moment that the world to which he is oriented is truly the same world that I perceive. If he perceives something, that something must be my own world, since it is there that he comes into being.”65 On the field of perception, in the varieties of relating, a bond is made between me and the Other who is in the world as well as belongs to the world: “The moment the man wakes up in the sun and reaches for his hat, between the sun which burns me and makes my eyes squint and the gesture which from a distance over there brings relief to my fatigue, between this sweating forehead and the protective gesture which it calls forth on my part, a bond is tied without my needing to decide anything. If I am forever incapable of effectively living the experience of the scorching the other suffers, the bite of the world as I feel it upon my body is an injury for anyone exposed to it as I am—and especially for this body which begins to defend itself against it.”66 It is this world, its destructive impact, that “starts to stir the sleeper previously motionless who now begins to adjust to his gestures as their reason for being.”67 The person waking up is integrated into this

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world exactly as I am, yet decentered as well. We stand, perceive, speak, and talk with and through our corporeality together in a community of Being, yet one of Doing as well.

Chapter 7

Pathology of the Lived Body

Contemplating time and moment in The Step Not Beyond, Maurice Blanchot writes, “In me there is someone who does nothing but undo this me: infinite occupation.”1 At the outset, however, something like an exceptional riddle befalls an Other: “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. [. . .] ‘What’s happened to me?’ he thought. It was no dream.”2—In October 1915, as part of an intense correspondence with the Kurt Wolff publishing house concerning his narrative The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung), the young Franz Kafka stringently opposed any potential illustration by the artist Ottomar Starke of these events around Gregor Samsa, which would show Gregor Samsa as an insect: “Not that, please not that!” Kafka vehemently insisted. “The insect itself cannot be depicted. It cannot even be shown from a distance.”3 Instead, he would propose illustrating select scenes like: “the parents and the head clerk in front of the locked door, or even better, the parents and the sister in the lighted room, with the door open upon the adjoining room that lies in darkness.”4 Doing so, Kafka refused the depiction of the insect, which he deemed impossible, shifting his focus onto an alternative for potentially making images of the human antagonists surrounding Gregor Samsa—his parents, his sister Grete, and the head clerk—whereas the protagonist Gregor Samsa himself should remain in the dark, rendered invisible. In this way, Kafka insists on writing what is Other yet not depicting it, thus apparently giving preference—at least in this correspondence with his publisher—to a literary poetics as opposed to a photographic sort. It is how Gesa Schneider, closely reading Kafka’s works in her doctoral dissertation Das Andere schreiben. Kafkas fotografische Poetik (Writing the Other: Kafka’s Photographic Poetics), thematizes his writing generally and calls The Metamorphosis into question specifically: “The vermin must emerge ‘from out of the darkness,’ for any visual equivalent is rejected in this narrative.”5 For the reader, the metamorphosis is not resolved, much less decrypted. As shown at the start, the transformation has “already taken place, when the text 107

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begins.”6 Any mimetic reenactment, much less any understanding of events, has been ruled out. 7.1 AMONGST OTHERS Yet what is the Other, then, that Kafka would write, or describe, in this narrative, though not turn into an image? Schneider puts forward that, in the process of Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis, Kafka’s text does not offer any aesthetics of the word—one that would decide between “imagination” (Einbildung) and “representation” (Vorstellung), one that would not make possible any relation to a referent outside of the text, say, to any image that over the course of the narrative Gregor Samsa views of himself—not like the one, for example, in a photo from the past, from his time in the military, portraying him “in a lieutenant’s uniform, his hand on his sword, a carefree smile on his lips, demanding respect for his bearing and his rank.”7 Instead, as the “poetological dimension of the text,” it would more likely turn out “that Gregor only first arises in the productive dimension of the reader: Gregor is the reader’s ‘image-in-ing’ (Ein-Bildung) in the truest sense of the word: an image in the reader’s head that arises without any previously imagined prototype.”8 Gregor’s objective body would change, dissipate, and disappear. Here and in Kafka’s other texts, Schneider continues, the experience of reading is one that altogether poses questions about images in the readers’ heads, and which causes a blind spot to appear where Gregor Samsa ought to be, because he is never seen “from the outside” and at the moment of his death turns into a kind of “stuff” (Zeug): “indescribable, in contrast to the letters” from his family to his employers and superiors, letters written as excuses for the work interruption after Gregor’s demise, after he turns into a thing, letters “that were supposed to be written at that very moment; in this respect, we are given something to read on Gregor’s indescribability by way of this metonymical shift.”9 In this way, throughout the text Gregor Samsa can only be read, yet not imaged, as an insect: the impossibility of his depiction raises questions about what can be portrayed, which, according to Schneider, are posed about the photographs that constitute the counterpoint to the text in Kafka. Photography is what is Other in the text and makes possible a dynamic that comes to be as a result of alternating between text and image, between what cannot be portrayed and what can, an energy given to reading; sensory perceptions and representations change, just as the appearances of Gregor Samsa do collectively amongst Others, his parents, his sister Grete, and the head clerk, who via Kafka bring relationships into the text without photographs, too, without images: the Others are put into relationships of alterity, in existential,

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economic, and bureaucratic constraints, made readable by way of relations to the Self and the Alien, during the course of which latitudes for their respective possibilities criss-cross time and again. Gregor Samsa’s experience of “Becoming-animal” (Tier-Werdens) is therefore in no way any experience of solipsism but, rather, one of alterity, in which other persons surrounding him play a role, as “Being-human” (Mensch-Sein) also does. In the process of his metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa is subjected to persons, in the field of vision of his family members, of the head clerk, of servants, and of lodgers. He faces all of them in various ways, is initially pitied, then increasingly disregarded and finally rejected and excluded from the circle of humankind, a circle in which he would like to be included as well until the very end. Exclusion from this circle, however constituted, as well as inclusion in the same thus point out existential moves that Kafka renders visible time and again, thinking them through, putting them to paper as lifeworld constellations, whether in literary works like The Metamorphosis or in his letters and diary entries. For his protagonist in his narrative The Metamorphosis would it then involve first of all finding a way out of the human circle of his family and work colleagues, escaping it, by withdrawing, namely, into himself? In this context, in his doctoral dissertation Der Selbe und der Andere. Formen und Strategien der Erfahrung der Fremde bei Franz Kafka (The Same and the Other: Forms and Strategies of Experiencing the Alien in Franz Kafka), Patrice Djoufack highlights Gregor Samsa’s “masking as an animal,” which supposedly serves to “escape the pressures of the working world,” “so as to be freed from familial burdens and paternal power,” in his own encapsulation, “in order to flee from the failed communication with the Other.”10 Concerned with himself, still thinking on the inside as a human, though living on the outside as an animal, Gregor Samsa ends up on a path of isolation: he isolates himself, withdraws into his room, hides himself away. He is isolated, avoided, forced back into his room, and hides away that much more. In the end, according to Djoufack, what results is Gregor Samsa’s desperation and his subsequent death, by which Kafka once again supposedly demonstrates “the instability of any relationship based on acquiescence” and subsequently unmasks “the asymmetry in the relationship between Gregor and his family,” In so doing, Kafka denounces acquiescence as rejection of any face-to-face relationship “which would denote acknowledging the Other and respecting their Otherness.”11 For Kafka, fundamental constellations like these harbor further potential for conflict that, in line with The Metamorphosis and beyond it, gets pushed to the outside in his own writing, toward the Other: Kafka wishes to read his texts aloud, to his friends, his sisters, and even his father. He writes, reads, and works for rapprochement, acknowledgement, not out of vanity, which he himself censures, but out of the need to have himself drawn out of his work.

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Keeping in line with Blanchot here, this need is one by which the work is able to unfold “in the vocal space.”12 It is by way of this unfolding in the vocal space, in this performative situation, that Kafka comes to know that he can write. Only this knowing is not his. Even the capability for writing does not belong to him. “With few exceptions,” Blanchot points out, “he never finds in what he writes the proof that he is actually writing. His texts are at most preludes, investigative, preliminary attempts.”13 To this observation Blanchot adds a diary entry from Kafka on The Metamorphosis, in which Kafka writes: “Anxiety alternating with self-assurance at the office. Otherwise more confident. Great antipathy to ‘Metamorphosis.’ Unreadable ending. Imperfect almost to its very marrow. It would have turned out much better if I had not been interrupted at the time by the business trip.”14 According to Blanchot, this entry alludes to the conflict in which Kafka lives, and by he breaks down in the end: Kafka has an profession and a family; he “belongs to the world and must belong to it. The world provides time, but takes it up. [. . .] Kafka would require more time, but he would also need less world. The world is initially his family, whose constraints he finds hard to put up with even though he is never equal to freeing himself.”15 In letters to his older sister Gabriele “Elli” Hermann concerning the education of her children, Kafka provides a look into this world: in a close reading of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Kafka writes to her about the family as a specific organism, in which every family portrays in the first instance an animal context, “as it were [. . .] a single bloodstream.”16 The family as its own circulatory system, from which it is difficult to run away, is an organism, albeit an “extremely complex and unbalanced one” that, like any organism, strives for “equilibrium.” In the intertwined relationships between parents and children—following Kafka’s recourse to the sixth chapter in Swift’s novel, in particular, about the educational methods of the inhabitants of Lilliput— this striving for equilibrium is called education.17 “Why it is called that is incomprehensible, since it shows no trace of real education, that is, the quiet, unselfish, loving development of potentialities of a growing human being or merely the calm toleration of the child’s independent development.”18 What is more, he says, it is “usually a violently convulsive attempt at equilibrium of an animal organism condemned, at least for many years, to the most acute imbalance. This organism, to distinguish it from the individual human animal, might be called the family animal.”19 Instead of development, condemnation; instead of equilibrium, a transformation—both of these, condemnation and transformation, allow for breaking out of the circle of humanity in the particular reading of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, so as to establish in Gregor Samsa’s “Becoming-animal,” in his metamorphosis into “beetle, junebug, dungbeetle, cockroach, which traces an intense line of flight in relation to the

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familial [Oedipal] triangle [between father, mother, and children] but especially in relation to the bureaucratic and commercial triangle.”20 The possibility of a way out, of a line of escape from the disequilibrium in the metamorphosis—in this way both Deleuze and Guattari find access to Kafka’s work, taking it into their rhizomatous thinking, which involves relationships to sexuality, to animals and plants, to natural and artificial object, which concerns all manner of Becoming (Werden), in which territory appears as the site for thinking by way of movement, time, and objective bodies and is inscribed into their writings as a space that can be determined geographically and is inhabited locally: there are many entrances into Kafka’s world, into his rhizome, his burrow, which prevents intrusion of the “enemy,” that is, of the Signifier. Thus conceived, we are compelled not to interpret Kafka’s work but to test it experimentally. “We,” Deleuze and Guattari, “believe only in one or more Kafka machines that are neither structure nor phantasm. We believe only in a Kafka experimentation that is without interpretation or significance and rests only on tests of experience [. . .] A writer isn’t a writer-man.”21 This human being is also a political and experimental person; they are a “machine-man” who “ceases to be a man in order to become an ape [as in A Report to an Academy] or a beetle, or a dog, or a mouse, a becoming-animal, a becoming-inhuman,” whereby one turns into an animal through voice and sound and style, from which the concept of the machine enters into the center of thinking via Kafka as well.22 In this way, with their vocabulary for the diversities of territories, machines, and oedipalizations, Deleuze and Guattari decide to focus on Gregor Samsa’s becoming-animal, as part of which ethology and psychoanalysis especially make a conceptual reservoir available, through which The Metamorphosis can be described as an exemplary history of a reoedipalization, in which Gregor Samsa—after he is not only isolated in the end but also pelted by his father with an apple, which remains stuck in his back—withdraws, waiting for his death, thus getting no further even in his becoming-animal.23 Subsequently, therefore, Deleuze and Guattari ask, “Aren’t the animals still too formed, too significative, too territorialized?”24 They lose sight of the recognition (and acknowledgement) of the Other, of the other person. In the case of one specific word, however, Deleuze and Guattari change the view as well as shift the perspective leading back into the circle of humankind, calling into question the experience that Kafka reports in his experiments. 7.2 PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE IMMUTABLE EVENT “Whenever thought is caught in a circle, this is because it has touched upon something original, its point of departure beyond which it cannot move

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except to return.”25 Blanchot’s thinking oscillates in a circular movement between considerations on literary space, on experience, and on mortality; inspired by Kafka, it is a contemplation about “contented death,” which Blanchot extracts from a diary entry by Kafka, in which he writes that he said to Max Brod on “the way home” (Nachhauseweg) that “I shall lie very contentedly on my deathbed, provided the pain isn’t too great. I forgot—and later purposely omitted—to add that the best things I have written have their basis in this capacity of mine to meet death with contentment.”26 Blanchot summarizes the passage as: “you cannot write unless you remain your own master before death; you must have established with death a relation of sovereign equals.”27 From this position he wonders, “If you lose face before death, if death is the limit of your self-possession, then it slips the words out from under the pen, it cuts in and interrupts. The writer no longer writes, he cries out—an awkward, confused cry which no one understands and which touches no one.”28 Kakfa, according to Blanchot, feels that art is a relationship with death here. Yet why with death? In Blanchot’s way of reading, because death is what is most extreme. Whoever has death at their disposal has control over themselves; they are “linked to the whole of his capability; [they are] power through and through. Art is mastery of the supreme moment, supreme mastery.”29 Blanchot puts forward that when Kafka ties his capability for writing the best he has to his capacity for dying content, he is not alluding to any conception that “would concern death in general. Rather, he alludes to his own experience. For one reason or another he lies down untroubled upon his death bed, and that is why he can direct upon his heroes an untroubled gaze and share their death with clear-sighted intimacy.”30 Here, too, Blanchot resituates The Metamorphosis; for him, the narrative is in the space of death, in which Gregor Samsa sees himself subjected to the indefinite time of dying, to the test of this alienness, like Kafka, as it were, who was subjected as well to such a test. For Kafka, then, dying content is still not anything that has to do with “an attitude that is good”; having a good attitude, rather, expresses in the first instance “discontent with life, exclusion from the happiness of living—that happiness which one must desire and love above everything.”31 The capability to die content, as Blanchot continues, denotes that “relations with the normal world are now and henceforth severed.”32 Kafka, therefore, is supposedly in some way already dead. That would be given to him, as was exile, too, and “this gift is linked to that of writing.”33 By way of the gift of writing, Blanchot arrives at Kafka’s retreat into himself, into his own encapsulation, into the demand for his self-selected solitude, which is found again as a theme in his diary entries: “If I do not save myself in some work, I am lost. Do I know this distinctly enough? I do not hide from men because I want to live peacefully, but because I want to perish peacefully.”34 Kafka’s work is writing,

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and he withdraws from the world in order to pursue it. Kafka writes to die in peace. Writing to perish peacefully. Yes, but how does one write? What allows one to write? Blanchot answers: “you cannot write unless you are able to die content.”35 As part of this very contradiction, a circular move has been completed in following Blanchot and Kafka, for it leads along with them back to the profundity of experience: write to be able to die—die to be able to write. “These words close us into their circular demand; they oblige us to start from what we want to find, to seek nothing but the point of departure, and thus to make this point something we approach only by quitting it. But they also authorize this hope: the hope, where the interminable emerges, of grasping the term, of bringing it forth.”36 Blanchot’s thinking circles around questions about living with death, around questions about the possibility and/ or the impossibility of death, questions that cannot be answered, and which he nevertheless draws from, so as to transfer them into a literary space in which what can and cannot be thought end up in a tense interaction where conflicts can be seen, conflicts that also occupy Kafka. Both live from what is uncertain, losing and finding themselves in openness. “The work draws whoever devotes himself to it toward the point where it withstands its impossibility. The work comes through this test and is, in this respect, experience. But what does that word mean?”37 The experience of one’s own death is the potential experience of impossibility. It is the experience that remains incomplete and indefinite. We enter thus into a relationship with the Other, with death. We are not used to it and approach it as we do what is unusual, which is astounding, according to Blanchot; or we approach it as we do what is uncanny, which shifts into horror: “The thought of death does not help us to think death, does not give us death as something to think. Death, thought, close to one another to the extent that thinking, we die, if, dying, we excuse ourselves from thinking: every thought would be mortal; each thought, the last thought.”38 Writing. The moment. The time. Passing away. “Time. Time: the step not beyond that is not accomplished in time would lead outside of time, without this out side being intemporal, but there where time would fall, fragile fall, according to this ‘outside of time in time’ towards which writing would attract us, were we allowed, having disappeared from ourselves, to write within the secret of the ancient fear.”39 We are not used to death: the experience of what is outside, of transience, of the finitude of our subjective capacity and linguistic capabilities. We write, or not. I write, or not. In the experience of writing something strikes me; the right hand I write with takes the pen, grabs it, encloses it, in a “tyrannical prehension,” because it is necessary, because I have to fulfil the demand of the break-in from outside, because it commands me to write; yet

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my left, nonwriting hand grabs the right one that is writing, interrupts it, stops the pen, opens the “sick” right hand that is writing, takes the pen away, keeps it away from the other hand: “The writer seems to be the master of his pen; he can become capable of great mastery over words and over what he wants to make them express. But his mastery only succeeds in putting him, keeping him in contact with the fundamental passivity where the word, no longer anything but its appearance—the shadow of a word—never can be mastered or even grasped. It remains the ungraspable which is also unreleasable: the indecisive moment of fascination.”40 “Mastery,” then, is always a matter of the hand that does not write, of the hand that “is capable of intervening at the right moment to seize the pencil and put it aside. Thus mastery consists in the power to stop writing, to interrupt what is being written, thereby restoring to the present instant its rights, its decisive trenchancy.”41 We are freed by the objective world while bracketing it. We restrain ourselves, seek respite, and refrain. We are interrupted and abstain from making judgment. Epoché’s first blow. Now, though, we must ask the questions all over again. My writing is a way of experiencing the outside breaking in. What is decisive now is not my writing activity, as part of which this break-in from outside happens, but the uncontrollability of the entire happening, the vehement jolt from the epoché, which makes me respond, which I can no longer rejoinder, not even by intruding with my nonwriting hand. It withdraws from me. Put another way, there is no artistic or philosophical method or technique that can bridle this happening.42 I lose all objective certainty and, as a result, become isolated. “The writer no longer belongs to the magisterial realm where to express oneself means to express the exactitude and the certainty of things and values according to the sense of their limits. What he is to write delivers the one who has to write to an affirmation over which he has no authority, which is itself without substance, which affirms nothing, and yet is not repose, not the dignity of silence, for it is what still speaks when everything has been said. This affirmation doesn’t precede speech, because it prevents speech from beginning, just as it takes away from language the right and the power to interrupt itself.”43 Blanchot describes this experience of the outside as an experience of being without work (le désœuvrement), as an occurrence that is manifest in the dissolution of each and every work and each and every thing, in the dissolution of all objective representation: the endless unworking (Entwerken) of language which at first supports all discourse as articulated, declarative, and definite speech, yet allows it to fall apart after all. “To write is to break the bond that unites the word with myself. It is to destroy the relation which, determining that I speak toward ‘you,’ gives me room to speak within the understanding which my word receives from you (for my word summons you, and is the summons that begins in me because it finishes

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in you). To write is to break this bond. To write is, moreover, to withdraw language from the world, to detach it from what makes it a power according to which, when I speak, it is the world that declares itself, the clear light of day that develops through tasks undertaken, through action and time.”44 Writing is the Interminable, the Incessant. The writer or poet fails. He possesses neither the capacity nor the power to control this happening. Blanchot clarifies this experience of unworking with the help of the Greek myth of Orpheus und Eurydice: although Orpheus possesses the capacity and the power to gain access to the underworld through his singing, so as to bring back his deceased wife Eurydice, in the end his work fails him, for he cannot bring his wife Eurydice back. He cannot bring her back to life, because in climbing back up to the world above he turned around to look at her, even though the condition given by the beguiled gods Hades and Persephone was to look only ahead during his return.45 Rainer Maria Rilke thematizes this unworking as a disintegration of work in his poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes”: He said to himself, they had to be behind him; said it aloud and heard it fade away. They had to be behind him, but their steps were ominously soft. If only he could turn around, just once (but looking back would ruin this entire work, so near completion), then he could not fail to see them, those other two, who followed him so softly: The god of speed and distant messages, a traveler’s hood above his shining eyes, his slender staff held out in front of him, and little wings fluttering at his ankles; and on his left arm, barely touching it: she. A woman so loved that from one lyre there came more lament than from all lamenting women; that a whole world of lament arose, in which all nature reappeared: forest and valley, road and village, field and stream and animal; and that around this lament-world, even as around the other earth, a sun revolved and a silent star-filled heaven, a lamentheaven, with its own, disfigured stars—: So greatly was she loved.46

Orpheus succeeds in going down into the underworld to Eurydice and, following Blanchot, it is the power of art through which the night is opened. “Because of art’s strength, night welcomes him; it becomes welcoming

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intimacy, the harmony and accord of the first night.”47 Orpheus descended to Eurydice; for him, she is the utmost that art can achieve; “Under a name that hides her and a veil that covers her, she is the profoundly obscure point toward which art and desire, death and night, seem to tend. She is the instant when the essence of night approaches as the other night.”48 The work of Orpheus, however, does not consist of “ensuring this point’s approach by descending into the depths. His work is to bring it back to the light of day and to give it form, shape, and reality in the day. Orpheus is capable of everything, except of looking this point in the face, except of looking at the center of night in the night. He can descend toward it; he can—and this is still stronger an ability—draw it to him and lead it with him upward, but only by turning away from it. This turning away is the only way it can be approached. This is what concealment means when it reveals itself in the night.”49 What remains to Orpheus as the only means of approach is turning away. “This is what concealment means when it reveals itself in the night.”50 In going, Orpheus ultimately forgets the work that he is to complete, and he also forgets it of necessity, according to Blanchot, “for the ultimate demand which his movement makes is not that there be a work, but that someone face this point, grasp its essence, grasp it where it appears, where it is essential and essentially appearance: at the heart of night.”51 In this regard, Blanchot adds that in the Greek myth a work can only be produced if the experience of depth beyond measure is not continued for its own sake; so, too, the experience that is considered to be necessary for the work, because it is in that experience that the boundlessness comes into play. The profundity is only revealed by its hiding in the work. It is not shown face-to-face—according to Blanchot, an essential, an inexorable answer. Yet the myth also shows that the fate of Orpheus is not to submit to this final law. “And, of course, by turning toward Eurydice, Orpheus ruins the work, which is immediately undone, and Eurydice returns among the shades. When he looks back, the essence of night is revealed as the inessential. Thus he betrays the work, and Eurydice, and the night.”52 Blanchot continues, though, that not turning around toward Eurydice would not mean any less: “the measureless, imprudent force of his movement, which does not want Eurydice in her daytime truth and her everyday appeal, but wants her in her nocturnal obscurity, in her distance, with her closed body and sealed face—wants to see her not when she is visible, but when she is invisible, and not as the intimacy of a familiar life, but as the foreignness of what excludes all intimacy, and wants, not to make her live, but to have living in her the plenitude of her death.”53 Yet that is the only thing that Orpheus can seek in the underworld. “All the glory of his work, all the power of his art, and even the desire for a happy life in the lovely, clear light of day are sacrificed to this sole aim: to look in the night at what night hides, the other night, the dissimulation that appears.”54

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What is revealed here is, for Blanchot, an infinitely problem-ridden move that the “day condemns as a form of unjustifiable madness, or as exonerating immoderation. From day’s perspective, the descent into the Underworld, the movement down into vain depths, is in itself excessive. It is inevitable that Orpheus transgress the law which forbids him to ‘turn back,’ for he already violated it with his first steps toward the shades.”55 In keeping with Blanchot, this observation suggests that Orpheus never stopped being turned toward Eurydice: “he saw her invisible, he touched her intact, in her shadowy absence, in that veiled presence which did not hide her absence, which was the presence of her infinite absence.”56 Following Blanchot, in the interplay between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, the gaze of Orpheus ends up being a kind of poetic affirmation: “Had he not looked at her, he would not have drawn her toward him; and doubtless she is not there, but in this glance back he himself is absent. He is no less dead than she—dead, not of that tranquil worldly death which is rest, silence, and end, but of that other death which is death without end, the ordeal of the end’s absence.”57 Orpheus’s mistake is his impatience; his impatience wants “to exhaust the infinite, to put a term to the interminable, not endlessly to sustain the very movement of his error.”58 This mistake, this impatience is endlessly suffered and endured; it becomes true patience, is its intimacy, is shown to be the legitimate impulse: “in it begins what will become his own passion, his highest patience, his infinite sojourn in death.”59 In one of his Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke expresses Orpheus’s capture vis-à-vis transience with an imperative: “Be dead evermore in Eurydice” (Sei immer tot in Eurydike.).60 Blanchot supplements this disquieting demand of Rilke, however, with a quietening clause of his own: “Be dead evermore in Eurydice so as to be alive in Orpheus.”61 Precisely in this duplicity of death and life, Blanchot sees the experience of art as one of impotence which as image, as word, as rhythm, indicates the threatening proximity of a “vague and vacant outside, a neutral existence, nil and limitless; art points into a sordid absence, a suffocating condensation where being ceaselessly perpetuates itself as nothingness.”62 What can be added here? How can we think about it and continue to write? Blanchot does so with the aid of a primal scene in The Writing of the Disaster: “You who live later, close to a heart that beats no more, suppose, suppose this: the child—is he seven years old, or eight perhaps?—standing by the window, drawing the curtain and, through the pane, looking. What he sees: the garden, the wintry trees, the wall of a house. Though he sees, no doubt in a child’s way, his play space, he grows weary and slowly looks up toward the ordinary sky, with clouds, grey light, pallid daylight without depth. What happens then: the sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely black and absolutely empty, revealing (as though the pane had broken) such an absence that all

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has since always and forevermore been lost therein—so lost that therein is affirmed and dissolved the vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond. The unexpected aspect of this scene (its interminable feature) is the feeling of happiness that straightaway submerges the child, the ravaging joy to which he can bear witness only by tears, an endless flood of tears. He is thought to suffer a childish sorrow; attempts are made to console him. He says nothing. He will live henceforth in the secret. He will weep no more.”63 Here, too, the experience is one that remains incomplete and indeterminate. Seamlessly linked to it is the experience of one’s own death as the possible experience of impossibility. Write to be able to die—die to be able to write. In other words, inherent to the experience of one’s own death are pathic traits. It immutably happens to me, befalls me, touches me, and preempts me. I am subjected to it. Put another way, I go through an experience that is imposed on me. I am subjected to a claim that eludes my control, that surpasses my potential. In his study Philosophische Anthropologie (Philosophical Anthropology), Wilhelm Kamlah understands this passive experience of one’s own death to be an immutable event (Widerfahrnis), of the same sort as those to which one’s own birth likewise belongs, and he interlaces both with considerations on action: “All our lives are stretched in between the immutable events of birth and death. For us, our own actions do not have the first or last word. Yet even when we act, something always befalls us. There are immutable events without actions, though there are not any pure actions. Even such a powerful act like the so-called ‘creative’ one is still always dependent on conditions and subjected to disruptions which are predefined, such that it more more less does not ‘succeed’ at all. Actions lead either to success or to failure or even to expected side-effects.”64 According to Kamlah, immutable events are related to our neediness; they are “joyful” or “adverse,” “pleasant” or “unpleasant,” “good” or “bad,” not in making moral distinctions but as distinctions in immutable events. When action is added, the distinction between “good” or “bad” is one, for example, that emphasizes success or failure. If, when asked about my condition, I say, “Things are going bad with me,” I am still not acting or referring to any immutable event as an occurrence, either, because I cannot ignore what befalls me: “Something befalls someone” is opposed to “Something is occurring.” I do not feel well. I am in bad shape, suffering from an illness that affects me directly, that is an insidious process, that befalls me.In this sense, Kamlah proposes distinguishing even more between “good” and “bad” immutable events: a “good” immutable event would be a longlasting process, say, the “increase of strengths and capabilities in childhood and youth,” a happening that would not be regarded, though, as an immutable event; whereas a “bad” immutable event—say, ageing, which is moreover

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“riddled with eventful immutable incidents of breakdown in strengths, of complaints about aches and pains”—is, on the other hand, regarded as such.65 A depletion of possibilities like this supposedly comes about in ageing, “as they say, on its own, but is experienced as destiny beforehand, too.”66 Immutable events and actions are enmeshed in one another, interlacing activity and passivity, suffering and passion, doing and not-doing with each other. Human beings do not act, Kamlah says, “from dawn to dusk but, rather, ‘leave time’ for themselves to rest, sleep, laze about. Immutable events like an accident or death simply ‘hit’ them.”67 Immutable events and actions are interlaced with kinds of dispositions: “Vis-à-vis other immutable events they do not act, really, though they do not simply suffer them, either, but ‘behave’ one way or another instead. Straightforward examples: coughing, stumbling, laughing, breathing. Less obvious examples: fright, anxiety, worry, mistrust—ways not of acting but certainly of behaving.”68 Kamlah’s anthropological thinking of immutable events provides an outline here on theories of action, which are put forth in phenomenologically thinking immutable events by way of corporeal dispositions: the lived, subjective body is always already present, before we think it through; it is already active, before we are able to comprehend it. Our own bodies precede, in a move of their own; they function in an antecedent way, limiting thematization and verbalization: in looking at my Self in the mirror, I surprise myself and see myself as the Other; in the instant of an echo, I hear my voice and it sounds alien to me; in the moment of weariness, the lived body’s movement becomes independent and withdraws from me. The lived body’s incomprehensibilities like these point to the alienness of our own bodies. In thinking of immutable events between experience and action, alienness is thought as a figure of depletion not only in regard of the Other; rather, it is to be understood more in interlacing with a relation to self, which includes moments of a withdrawal from self. In further thinking through immutable events between experience and action, Bernhard Waldenfels proposes to visualize more precisely the corporeal situation that we have ended up in, and that cannot be reduced to practical or cognitive acts performed. Our corporeal anchoring in the natural and social world is one that constitutes our being affected and vulnerable. As demand or hindrance, something is always entering into play that we do not have a hold on, “that is not up to us ourselves,” as Waldenfels shows, for example, in his article “Das überbewältigte Leiden. Eine pathologische Betrachtung” (“Super-Surmounted Suffering: A Pathological Observation”). In this article, pathic moments of life emerge which overwhelm, overtake, and overcome us, which we are unable to surmount, which we are unable to safeguard against, not even in any systematic “super-surmounting” (Überbewältigung):69 As an ingredient, the immutable event is added to every action and experience, “all

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the more so, the more incisive the experiences are and the more intensely they transform us.”70 These, then, are the transformations, transitions that Waldenfels highlights, like between getting well and becoming sick, in which the Self is changed, as in the process of an insidious illness as part of which we come up against impairing impacts. At this juncture, in line with Sigmund Freud, Waldenfels discusses sources of suffering: according to Freud, we are threatened with suffering (1) “from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals”; (2) “from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction”; (3) “and finally from our relations to other men.”71 Consequently, it is the prevailing concern as well, the corporeal situation of being abandoned, the questions concerning the to-what-end (Woraufhin) for a behavior or a lived experience; concerning the intentionality around inquiries into the for-what (Worauf), into moments of surprise, those of preemption, of happenstance, of confrontations with the unfamiliar, of making claims, according to which responsivity has to expand; for this situation, the corporeal experience of it, and its pathic dimension are irrevocable. This thinking through of even corporeal behavior as ways of lived experience does not begin with the ego, with the subject, but instead with the claim of the Other and with the response to the Alien. 7.3 PEDAGOGY FOR THE SENSES In her autobiographical novel The Body Where I Was Born (originally published in Spanish as El cuerpo en que nací), the writer Guadalupe Nettel opens with a psychoanalytic therapy session about the following childhood memory, in a work also concerning the sources of suffering (1) from her own objective body; (2) from the outside world; and (3) from relationships with other persons: “I was born with a white beauty mark, or what others call a birthmark, covering the cornea of my right eye. That spot would have been nothing had it not stretched across my iris and over the pupil through which light must pass to reach the back of the brain. They didn’t perform cornea transplants on newborns in those days; the spot was doomed to remain for several years. And in the same way an unventilated tunnel slowly fills with mold, the pupillary blockage led to the growth of a cataract. The only advice the doctors could give my parents was to wait: by the time their daughter finished growing, medicine would surely have advanced enough to offer the solution they now lacked. In the meantime, they advised subjecting me to a series of annoying exercises to develop, as much as possible, the defective eye.”72

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The body in which Nettel is born, which is responsible for the title given her novel, is one living with an eye disorder that has an effect of her Self in its entirety. It subjects her body in which she was born, by way of the materiality of her objective body, to experiences that also shape her situating in the world, and which she must try to reshape at the advice of physicians and parents, even though her subjective body is in fact itself changing, on its own. In what follows, Nettel compares the exercises imposed on her to train her “deficient” eye, to have it develop further, forcing optical movements, with those introduced by Aldous Huxley in his treatise The Art of Seeing: so, for example, a kind of confidence in the harmlessness of sunlight can supposedly be acquired by becoming used to that light in a step-by-step process—“Sitting comfortably, lean back and, ‘letting go and thinking looseness,’ close the eyes and turn them towards the sun. To avoid internal staring and the possibility of too prolonged an exposure to the light of any given portion of the retina, move the head gently but fairly rapidly from side to side.”73 Like Nettel, Huxley also suffers from a decrease in visual acuity and thematizes it in parts concerning the potential of a practice to surmount the suffering, though not in the sense of any super-surmounting that attempts systematic safeguards but one that, on the contrary, recognizes (and acknowledges) pathic moments as a component of one’s own experience and action, so as to design from them a pedagogy for the senses, which can aid in describing her own praxis as a corporeal praxis, too. Belonging to that exercise is a kind of learning, a coming to learn that starts with the prevailing concern, as in the case of Nettel, who proceeds to render visible here what at first remains invisible, hidden, undercover, and excluded for her.74 Her exercises take place at home, by herself, alone, in her own, isolated room. As soon as she leaves it, undertaking a walk to go outside, she gets a bandage pasted over her “deficient” eye, which remains stuck on her half the day: “It was a piece of flesh-colored cloth with sticky, adhesive edges, covering my upper eyelid down to the top of my cheekbone. At first glance, it looked like I had no eye, only a smooth surface there. Wearing the patch felt unfair and oppressive. It was hard to let them put it on me every morning and to accept that no hiding place and no amount of crying could save me from that torture. I don’t think there was a single day I didn’t resist. It would have been so easy to wait until they left me at the school entrance to yank the patch off with the same careless gesture I used to tear scabs off my knee. But for some reason I still can’t understand, I never tried to remove it.”75 While in this early passage of her memoirs Nettel describes her impairment, visible as well to Others, via the covering up of that damage, in the next paragraph she goes one step further and has these very Others appear: “With the patch, I had to go to school, identify my teacher and the shapes of my school supplies, come home, eat, and play for part of the afternoon. At around five o’clock,

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someone would come to say it was time to take it off, and with these words I would return to the world of clarity and precise shapes. The people and things around me suddenly changed. I could see far into the distance and would become mesmerized by the treetops and infinite leaves that composed them, the contours of the clouds in the sky, the tint of the flowers, the intricate pattern of my fingertips. My life was divided between two worlds: that of morning, built mostly out of sounds and smells, but also of hazy colors; and that of evening, always freeing, yet at the same time, overwhelmingly precise.”76 Changing the bandage allows Nettel to see and not to see, perceiving differently in each case, as a phenomenon of the transition from one modality to the next and back again, as part of which all the sensory spheres are concerned, and her vision is also in the visual field of Others. In the process, a visual occurrence is differentiated between looking and looking at, which becomes a double problem for her: “Given the circumstances, school was a place even more inhospitable than those institutions often are. I couldn’t see much, but it was enough to know how to get around within the labyrinth of hallways, fences, gardens. I liked climbing the trees. My hyperdeveloped tactile sense allowed me to easily distinguish the firm branches from the frail, and to know which cracks in the trunk made the best footholds. The real problem wasn’t so much the place as it was the other children. We knew there were many differences between us; they stayed away from me, and I from them. My classmates would ask, suspiciously, what the patch was hiding—it had to be something terrifying if it needed to be covered—and when I wasn’t paying attention, they would reach with their grubby little hands, trying to touch it. Alone, my right eye made them curious and uncomfortable. Sometimes now, at the ophthalmologist’s office or at a bench in the park, I cross paths with a patched child and recognize in them the anxiety so characteristic of my childhood. It keeps them from being still. I know it’s how they face danger—it’s evidence of good survival instincts. They’re on edge because they can’t stand the idea that a cloudy world should slip through their fingers. They have to explore, find a way to own it.”77 Nettel’s visual defect impairs her Self and affects Others, encounters the opinion of Others, as Nettel describes it. By way of their thinking, her problem is shown to be twofold in various phases of her life, especially during childhood and puberty. It appears both in the pathos of her lived body and in the pathos of the other lived body as a comprehensive pathology of the body, which via the white spot in her right eye brings along with it a constant uneasiness, which needs to be questioned on both sides, here in the case of Nettel and her schoolmates, in relationships of alterity.78 With this seeking move, Nettel highlights moments of being abandoned, moments she touches upon by way of the gift of writing, in her withdrawal into herself, in the immutable event of her (not) self-selected solitude. It marks a condition she connects time and again to Kafka and The Metamorphosis, as

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she has also pointed out in interviews where she, concerned with herself like Gregor Samsa, goes down the path of isolation, withdrawing into her room for at least half a day, crawling into a corner like a waterbug or a cockroach (la cucaracha), as in the nickname her mother chose for her as a child.79 In this regard, Nettel demonstrates like Kafka asymmetries in relationships, in human “organisms,” between her and her mother, other family members, and schoolmates, likewise thematizing the relationship with Others, acts of acknowledgement and respect. Yet her work does not result in desperation, let alone in reflections on any subsequent death. On the contrary, by way of her experiences, her actions, dispositions, and memories, Nettel regains her work for her life, which she in fact never has but which she demands, which she clears a place for, even via her own resistance and that of the Others. Her biography and her autobiographical writing testify to the fact that they are permeated by the lives of Others. Only amongst Others does Nettel make it back into her lived body, in which she was born, a move that she pointed to from the outset in her book, in which she placed an epigraph ahead of her first sentences. It is taken from Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Song”: “yes, yes, that’s what I wanted, I always wanted, I always wanted, to return to the body where I was born.”80 In the end, in line with Ginsberg, Nettel returns to her objective body by not allowing an operation planned by her mother to be carried out, refusing it for herself. Yet she also returns to her lived, subjective body, for she has learned to accept that its pathic moments belong to her Self in its entirety and to that of the Others.

Chapter 8

Aesthetics of L’écriture Feminine

In 1975, in a special edition of the French journal L’Arc about Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous published “The Laugh of the Medusa” (Le rire de la Méduse), a moving/movable text on femininity in writing with the character of a manifesto.1 In providing a challenge, making a call to action, as well as intending an impact, the author’s emphatic writing offers an act of linguistic, performative, and political intervention: “I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement.”2 In this way it is made manifest, becomes obvious, visible, and declares that woman writes her self, must write herself. This movement’s imperative is unmistakeable: Write! 8.1 THE GIFT OF UNFORESEEABILITY Needs and necessities become manifest, thus overt, clearly recognizable, and even palpable, for Cixous is writing about manifestations of using violence on women, of their oppression, their absence in the text, in the world, and in history. She asks how becoming palpably opposed toward these manifestations is possible and compels us to take pen in hand, to write our selves, to enact our own feminine movement, one that could start with the ancient myth of Medusa and from there carry out a shift in meaning. In the conventional telling of the myth, the Medusa, the Gorgon, the one who roars like thunder, has “a horrifying, round visage filled with rage, bronze curly locks or snakes in her hair, or on her belt, a maw full of long pig’s teeth glistening white, and wide-open, flashing eyes. Those who gazed upon this visage or were struck by the flashes coming from the gorgon’s eyes immediately fell into a torpid state and changed to stone. The gorgon’s arms 125

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were made of iron, and she had powerful wings, moreover, with which she could fly rapidly through the air. The colour of her body or her clothing was black. She had two similar, immortal sisters, one of whom was called Stheno (the Strong One) and the other Euryale (the Long Jumper); she herself was called Medusa and was, in contrast to her sisters, mortal. All the gods and humans hated this monster because they were afraid of her; only Poseidon, the frightful Earth-Shaker, from whom come all the sea’s violent agitations by storm and bad weather, once lay with the gorgon on the flowery floor of the garden of the gods in western Oceanus. When she became pregnant, Perseus was dispatched to free the world from the pernicious gorgon.”3 In shifting the meaning, however, Cixous lets Medusa laugh, such that she is able to free herself from patriarchal logic. The écriture feminine proposed in this way is one of a double movement through time and space: on the one hand, it moves forward, writes in advance, for the future, and thus anticipates that which is not (yet). On the other hand, she also goes back, points behind, gazes into the past, though only to reinforce the notion that what is past can no longer determine what is future, for only foresight makes need urgent. With this move, the author and her readers make their way into an intermediate temporality in which what is new is detached from what is old, into a space which calls for foreseeing the unforeseeable, and in which it thus becomes possible to pursue other pathways: “But in spite of all this Little Red Riding Hood makes her little detour, does what women should never do, travels through her own forest. She allows herself the forbidden . . . and pays dearly for it: she goes back to bed, in grandmother’s stomach. The Wolf is grandmother, and all women recognize the Big Bad Wolf! We know that always lying in wait for us somewhere in some big bed is a Big Bad Wolf. The Big Bad Wolf represents, with his big teeth, his big eyes, and his grandmother’s looks, that great Superego that threatens all the little female red riding hoods who try to go out and explore their forest without the psychoanalyst’s permission. So, between two houses, between two beds, she is laid, ever caught in her chain of metaphors, metaphors that organize culture . . . ever her moon [la lune] to the masculine sun [le soleil], nature to culture, concavity to masculine convexity, matter to form, immobility/inertia to the march of progress, terrain trod by the masculine footstep, vessel . . . While man is obviously the active, the upright, the productive . . . and besides, that’s how it happens in History.”4 How do we account for this history, so as to elude it? How do we explode this chain of metaphors? How do we confront the psychoanalytical, maternal Superego? Cixous writes her text as a woman for women and, taking feminine desire as a point of departure, makes her way into the intertwined relationship between love and hate, appropriation and rejection. She interrogates masculine systems of order to disrupt them and to find the site of the feminine.

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Thus, foreseeing the unforeseeable also means putting what is not written to paper, preempting what for the author is not yet on the page in the Here and Now and, from that position, enacting a universal movement in and with the written text. Her writing comes from the moment, from need and necessity; it is wagering, prewagering and getting involved in what women have in common, in understanding a universal subject that unites real enjoyment and discursive thought, so as to speak exactly this commonality, to have women make their own sense and come to their own senses. It is an act of writing in a declarative way, one that brings real enjoyment and discursive thought together, one that works on feminine pleasure and on the production of something unconscious that turns against the cooptation resulting from the classic and thus culturally historicized unconscious, which has been placed above the figure of lack by psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud or Jacques Lacan: What does she want? Woman is unable to say anything about her pleasure. According to Cixous, woman is in fact the undefined and undefinable being that does not know herself; her lack of a phallus makes her a desexualized being that is unable to say anything about her pleasure; she is not excluded from what is symbolic because she lacks this point of reference, because the threat and the fear of castration are only memorialized for little boys. On the contrary, woman has to “[s]peak of her pleasure and, God knows, she has something to say about that, so that she gets to unblock a sexuality that’s just as much feminine as masculine, ‘de-phallocentralize’ the body.”5 In this context, the different richness—the uniqueness of each and every feminine subject, the individual ways of being for all women—occurs to Cixous in the act of her thinking writing. From that wealth of feminine natures, it is no longer possible to talk about any one singular sexuality that passes through monolithically or uniformly given stages—comparable in a psychoanalytical manner to knowing of any one unconscious. It suggests, rather, a diversity as well as, in the way Cixous describes it, women’s inexhaustible power of imagination. It is exactly this strength that she conceives along with powers of artistic activity as in music, painting, and writing: “their stream of phantasms is incredible.”6 Writing in order to live. Here Cixous is enchanted by the respective worlds of a woman that have been described to her more than once by other women, worlds that could each be sought out in secret already in childhood, worlds of researching and acquiring knowledge, starting with systematically experiencing how one’s own body functions, as well as with precisely and passionately questioning one’s personal erotogeneity: “This practice, extraordinarily rich and inventive, in particular as concerns masturbation, is prolonged or accompanied by a production of forms, a veritable aesthetic activity.”7 Everyone’s own inexhaustible power of imagination—in sexuality, too—provides a creative diversity that moves forward. At this juncture, the

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imperative of movement originates with the objective body (Körper): Your body is yours, take it, feel no shame, loosen the tensions, do not hold back, do not be held back! Feminine desire starts to circulate and in every phase should become a pleasure that registers as a sound image, as a composition, as something beautiful that is no longer forbidden. The unending circulation of desire moves toward writing, too. In and with writing, it enables a Being-for-oneself (für-sich-Sein), a taking-to-Oneself (Sich-nehmen), in which nothing is contained or detained but is, rather, where something new is brought forth from oneself and is admitted, in an unconditional surge forward from inside to outside: it pushes into the world where it is borne with personal writing, writing by one’s own hand, during which I have got a grip on myself, allowing my own strengths to prevail, creating a site and a time of my own, perhaps self-determined, certainly resistant and, in any case, discovering and uncovering myself, for the movement of my writing pushes itself on. It captivates, finds and finds out, rebels, and allows a moment of liberation in which breakthroughs and transformations in history are anticipated: individually on one side, returning to my own objective body, writing; and individually on the other, in the act of woman having her say; while universally from both sides, in finally taking part, in landing a coup in written and spoken language, in which both of these sound or even sing and cannot be separated from each other. In doing so, writing also means being read, reading aloud, reciting, realizing what is written in a moment, so as to come back Here and Now to the Self, too, to raise my own voice and let it ring. It means exposing and disclosing myself. The movement of writing that pushes outside, repositions into rebellion, moves toward the Others: it is formed in disclosing, ascribing, addressing, by force of its poetry, of the alterity of Others and of taking part in and with Others; it comes back, from the Others, in a reciprocal movement seeking what is in common. Doing so, it develops an open side, writes side by side with Others.8 “Indeed, I always have the sensation that I’m not alone, but that I write to the other and in the name of others. It’s a kind of dialogue with my past selves, those who belong to memory and culture on the one hand and, on the other hand, with those I love in the present and in the future, and with whom I wish to realize a certain joy, a certain pain, a certain strength. Writing is always a tension in language, a struggle.”9 Might we here, along with Cixous, think alterity? Is her writing a thinking, a thinking-through of what she is speaking? Woman for women, again, once more obligated to having the character of a manifesto: in woman there is something, a force that brings forth the Other and is brought forth by Others. In her—primally shaping, cradling/giving—is found the gift of birth and

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therefore also: giving life. In her there is origin, space for Others. They are all themselves mother, child, daughter, sister, or: woman gives the other woman the woman. She also gives the other woman writing, l’écriture feminine, in that she writes from a movement, one that does not stop and cannot be foreseen, that cannot be arranged in order and, in that regard, infinitely circulates, a movement that brings its feminine desire into the text, into language, and thus can make itself and Others manifest, in that concepts disappear, roles disintegrate and enable change, a change in human relationships, in thinking, in all manner of acting: The approach is political. “It is the direction, it is the living space that one must not cover with a bound: the between-us that one must take care to keep: have humility, the generosity, to not precipitate . . . [For example, the extermination of women (gynocide), the slaughter of human beings, the massacres of Jewish women have at least merited the fact that we do not make any superficial comments about their fate. We must think for a long while. What does ‘thinking’ mean today, when newspapers suppress thinking?].”10 Thinking the Other. “It is our political woman’s duty to approach with slowness so as not to begin killing again, so as not to repress. The approach makes it possible to try and imagine oneself in the other’s place so as to be in sympathy. The approach makes it possible to open the space of the other. We must save the two ways of not letting the other exist [i.e., racism and misogyny], of cancelling, of excluding, or of occulting the other.”11 Sur-viving and re-viving, bringing-forth the Other in writing and speaking, in pre-scribing and pre-tending. Cothinking and cowriting this act of writing in a mimetic process. Eva Waniek points out that Cixous’s process corresponds in that regard to a mimetic process when it “finds traditional ways of writing, codes, concepts, and meanings to be ‘alien’ and does not identify with their calculus. In spite of this distance they are nevertheless ‘imitated’ or ‘mimed’ by Cixous [e.g., the components from the psychoanalytical and linguistic code], without being definitively taken up by her. In playing and miming these ‘alien’ discursive elements, she instead tries to portray their meanings in a broader context. Doing so, she involuntarily produces unaccustomed conceptual interlacing, which in turn lays open the discursive intersections they have in common.”12 When Cixous also pre-scribes and pre-tends in this way, appellatively and temporally, is her mimetic process one that disrupts, that causes unrest? In inquiries about Others, in interrogations of the one and the Others, in questions regarding Others, do I have to allow for the fact that her writing is an act of writing in the in-between, between the one and the Others? Do I then also end up incessantly swapping out, on the aforesaid and described, indeed inexhaustible path of that exchange? A path that is lined with thousands of encounters, as part of which metamorphoses of the Self and of Others become

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possible, in the intermediate space from which woman and man(!) create their shape. This path, which Cixous conceives along with a subversion of seeking, a search which she calls “bisexuality,” means: there is no setting down or setting in writing, neither exclusion of differences nor exclusion of gender but, rather, a replication of the effects of inscribing desire on all parts of my objective body and the other one; the desire of one, of mine to the other and back, without context, neither set down as mother, child, daughter, or sister nor fixed in the family or belonging to a generation; instead, it is incalculable and unforeseeable, especially as any preestablished theory, as a mere observation, but originating from the need and necessity of the moment, in bringing forth something new, in writing it down, within a poetic movement that is also philosophy. “A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive.”13 Such a text is the gift of unforeseeability. It volcanically elevates as well as sublates what incrustations there are. The woman who writes must be herself, so as to blow everything sky-high, bending truth, thwarting the path of symbolic order, unremittingly, submitting to no predominance. Her writing leads endlessly further, she traverses the Other, pauses only in brief embraces, wagers internally, if she wants knowledge, she refuses life nothing, her language does not contain, does not confine but bears, does not hold back but makes possible. Woman is the erotogeneity of the heterogeneous. It is not about herself for her but, rather, “she is dispersible, prodigious, stunning, desirous and capable of others, of the other woman that she will be, of the other woman she isn’t, of him, of you.”14 In this capacity of being for the Other—which is uttered by way of the textual gift of unforeseeability and thus comes onto and into the world—an ethics of ecstasis unfolds that in the literal sense initially allows woman to make an appearance and to step outside herself, to the extent that she of her own is, exists, occurs, and is not grounded or cannot be defined in the Other. Her erotogeneity of the heterogeneous thus is shown first of all to be a kind of self-attestation—I am from myself—from which the capacity for the Other springs forth and spills over, only to become finally forced on both sides as an impossibility of ascription. In this way, according to Cixous, women come to their differences, which is to say, that they affirm these differences with their capacity for the Other, over and above sexual differences, without consideration for familiar connections, for example, in which power relations between individual members or belonging to a generation play a role, even through to a kind of alienness, which is in turn affirmed: “I am for you what you want me to be at the moment you look at me in a way you’ve not ever seen me before: at every instant. When I write, it’s everything we don’t know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything

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we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.”15 In this passage, the frame of “I” and “You” obtains a fluidity that brings that structure into unison, blurs it, causes “I” and “You” nearly to melt together with each other, bound entirely to a flowing style of speech that renders the femininity in the writing visible, a spoken flow that in the last phrase even veils the above-mentioned psychoanalytical figures of lack from Freud and Lacan, in the way the German translator Claudia Simma accurately notices, rendering the original French in Cixous “Jamais nous ne nous manquerons” into German as: “Niemals werden wir uns (ver)fehlen”—We will never lack (or fail) ourselves—“which can mean that we will never fail each other, never abandon each other, or that we will never miss, lack, abandon each other or our selves.”16 Accordingly, to conceive alterity along with Cixous also means to make oneself conscious of the individual ways of being of each and every person, to bring them into language and onto paper, thus causing the various intertwined relationships between persons to form, so as to admit of diverse ways of living. 8.2 WRITING THINKING Speaking, writing, and reading from where, how, about what? How important to our own thinking and writing are the experiences we have, the personal memories? An interview by Enrico Ippolito and Tania Martini with Cixous sheds some light: HC: The first model or nearest object you can observe is you yourself. EI, TM: You yourself write poetically. HC: Of course. That is how philosophy ought to be, too. EI, TM: But often philosophy is not written poetically. HC: Then it’s not philosophy. EI, TM: Shouldn’t philosophy rather create new concepts, so as to open new ways of thinking? HC: Exactly that is the way to poetry.17

Cixous makes the argument in this way for a poetic philosophy that can open up new ways of thinking. Along the way she proposes creating new concepts, poetic concepts, by means of which thinking can take place, making something new possible. She develops a poetic praxis that works on shifting fixed ascriptions, as in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” which sets in motion a kind

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of thinking about writing and reading that begins to move in language itself, in that something happens that is found beyond what is possible. The text, her text, must be heard; it has music in itself and is not immediately legible, comprehensible, because it has hidden meanings. In this manner, Cixous practices literature and philosophy, which she does not separate in a declarative way from each other but brings together instead. What interests her is what is happening, what is already present, what is unexpected: thinking the event. In doing so, theory as inspiration does not even come into question for Cixous; in no way does she precede her text or dictate it at all; rather, it is more of a consequence of her text, which is poetic/philosophical in its origin, appearing either as a compromise or as an urgent necessity.18 Even when Cixous writes so-called theoretical texts—so as to respond to certain moments of tension in cultural events, in the context of which she is compelled by academic, journalistic, or political discourse to contemplate her own work once more, to interrupt her journey and take time for herself, to reveal in a didactic way the movement in her thinking—her texts are borne by a poetic rhythm. Even in this interruption they cannot be separated from it, even if it is initially detained, repressed, misunderstood, or even forgotten. Therefore, everything that could be described as “theoretical” in her case is nothing more than the interruption of the move that she herself undertakes, so as to underscore what she herself has written or what can be found even in her fictional texts. She maintains that no theory has ever inspired her poetic texts. On the contrary, she says, her poetic text sits on a bench or at a table somewhere in a café, in order to be recognized in univocal and immediately audible concepts. Theory thus does not have any pretence for her of additional ethical and political structure. She concedes that it is what a poet does in accepting their pedagogic responsibility.19 This responsibility is grounded in their disposition and in their position vis-à-vis that which keeps them in motion. Cixous is disposed toward what is otherwise and different. Her disposition becomes the expression for being open and keeping herself open toward those that are otherwise and different. Sense is not hermetically closed off but admitted instead. One engages with it. One is exposed to its accidental and incidental nature. “Less to say this or that than to listen to language speak,” as Mireille Calle describes this disposition, for as Cixous says, “Thus we have begun to exist, thus we write: begun, and by the middle. And: unbeknownst to us.”20 Calle points out that in and with Cixous, therefore, it is in this way just as much about disarming thought itself and working it out of consciousness, that “all writing is a factor of disruption, that one must lose the meaning for more to be discovered, spend [dépenser] to think [penser], go blind for the thought to arise in ‘the page to page of a book,’ according to the weight in the words

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it flexes.”21 In this writing thinking, then, “nothing is conceived outside the process of writing, but all the same neither is there textual diktat,” for it is thus always about an act of “writing that almost did not succeed and that fails at its task.”22 In the words of Cixous, this writing also turns toward painting: “only the impossibility of ever painting Fuji-Yama authorized the painter to paint and to attempt to paint his entire life. For if it ever came to pass that one succeeded in painting what one had dreamed of painting since the very first paint-brush, everything would perish on the spot: art, nature, the painter, hope, everything would have come to pass, the mountain would fade into a picture, the picture would lose the trembling desperation that delicately tears at its canvas. A stony completion would seize the universe.”23 It is impossible to reproduce what I see in front of me in the way it is naturally manifested from all sides. I cannot paint or describe the mountain in the way it is present for everyone. I can only paint and describe it in the way it is manifested to me. Are we dealing, then, with a contradiction that fundamentally constitutes art, namely, between that which is and that which ought to be? Would the impossibility of a natural—or, rather, living—reproduction be one that, in the words of Cixous and Calle, leads possibly to a “madness-writing,” to a “trembling desperation” of painting in view of its “mad truth”?24 As part of these questions, a comparison with Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” emerges. In the tale, a gravely ill, injured man and his servant invade an abandoned castle in Italy’s Apennines to seek refuge there after a long, persistent fever and high loss of blood, as the result of an attack. In a tower room isolated from the main building, the protagonist attempts to settle down and get relief by taking opium. From his bed he observes his surroundings in the evening, the space and the lighting. “Its walls were hung with tapestry and bedecked with manifold and multiform armorial trophies, together with an unusually great number of very spirited modern paintings in frames of rich golden arabesque. In these paintings, which depended from the walls not only in their main surfaces, but in the very many nooks which the bizarre architecture of the chateau rendered necessary—in these paintings my incipient delirium, perhaps, had caused me to take deep interest.”25 What strikes his eye, arouses his attention, are the images surrounding him; what lands in his hands is a book, the pages which describe these images fascinating him. He has his servant arrange the room, “that I might resign myself, if not to sleep, at least alternately to the contemplation of these pictures, and the perusal of a small volume which had been found upon the pillow, and which purported to criticise and describe them. Long—long I read—and devoutly, devotedly I gazed.”26 The hours pass, and the protagonist changes the arrangement of the candles so as not to awaken his servant. In doing so, one image in a niche of

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the room especially comes into focus, one in which a young woman can be seen. This image catches his eye, seizes him, and will not let him go. “The portrait, I have already said, was that of a young girl. It was a mere head and shoulders, done in what is technically a vignette manner; much in the style of the favorite heads of Sully. The arms, the bosom and even the ends of the radiant hair, melted imperceptibly into the vague yet deep shadow which formed the back-ground of the whole. The frame was oval, richly gilded and filagreed in Moresque. As a thing of art nothing could have been more admirable than the painting itself. But it could have been neither the execution of the work, nor the immortal beauty of the countenance, which had so suddenly and so vehemently moved me. Least of all, could it have been that my fancy, shaken from its half slumber, had mistaken the head for that of a living person. I saw at once that the peculiarities of the design, of the vignetting, and of the frame, must have instantly dispelled such an idea—must have prevented even its momentary entertainment.”27 Over the course of the night, in intensely contemplating the portrait, the observer comes to the conclusion that “I had found the spell of the picture in the absolute life-likeness of expression, which at first startling, finally confounded, subdued and appalled me.”28 In what follows, the observer takes his gaze away from the object of his disquiet and instead casts it into the book with the descriptions of the images to read further in it what was written about the oval portrait, whereby Poe changes the narrative point of view from that of the observer to the reproduction of the description concerning the story of how the image originated: the young woman in the image was depicted by her husband, whose art robbed her of time together with him; such that they, the woman and art, become rivals, culminating in the wish of the artist to make a portrait of his wife. Reluctantly, she yields to his wish, yet succumbs from the act: “And then the brush was given, and then the tint was placed; and, for one moment, the painter stood entranced before the work which he had wrought; but in the next, while he yet gazed, he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast, and crying with a loud voice ‘This is indeed Life itself!’ turned suddenly to regard his beloved:—She was dead.”29 In the death of the one portrayed Calle sees the contradiction in art that stretches it to its breaking point, the tension not just between what is and what ought to be but also, put another way, between what is life and what is not life: “reality, that is to say the young woman model from whom the very Life of the portrait is drawn, literally dies from the metaphor.”30 Precisely here is where the painter trembles, here where the mad-meaning truth of art (die wahn-sinnige Wahrheit) lies, for the work is not living life itself. For Calle, this knowledge is expressed with the aid of Poe in the work of Cixous as an unworking work that apprehends self-flexing writing, or which catches itself in the mirror of its like images, from Rembrandt to James Joyce to Clarice

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Lispector and Jacques Derrida. With her books, then, Cixous brings us “to the end of the world: of the world we imagine—which is thinkable, presentable, representable.”31 Yet how does writing thinking happen in this unworking sense, conceived also in view of the fact that it constantly undermines its activity by breaking with itself, interrupting itself, transforming itself incessantly? And, inquiring even further along the lines of Calle, what modi operandi, what artistic skill or self-subversion of art is necessary to regulate the mysterious forward movement of writing in line with Cixous? “[T]o tell the untenable tale that dreams of being natural, of speaking like the wind, the storm, the sea?”32 What basis for action enables “one to invent a writing from before the invention of writing [used only then], from before Thot”—the Egyptian god of the moon, of magic, of wisdom, of science, and of the scribes—“when the tree spoke,” when prophecies still came from an oak tree?33 Calle takes the latter from Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates muses with Phaedrus about the art of letters. Socrates makes the pronouncement: “Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who takes it over from him, on the supposition that such writing will provide something reliable and permanent, must be exceedingly simple-minded; he must really be ignorant of Ammon’s utterance, if he imagines that written words can do anything more than remind one who knows that which the writing is concerned with.”34 Phaedrus rejoins affirmatively, “Very true,” whereupon Socrates continues: “You know, Phaedrus, that’s the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever. And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parent to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself.”35 In following Calle, however, discourse needs rather the help of the feminine, as a nominalized adjective in the sense of a form of hybridity that is formulated in contradiction, say, to order, doctrine, or institution, one that correspondingly takes its time in weighing and balancing words and signs, so as to think through “what is uniquely at stake with the feminine. The time that you give yourself because you allow yourself to read. To read the difference.”36

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For Cixous, difference is situated particularly in regard of that which is transient, is happening, is in the process of passing by, which as Calle writes is “passing-passed-passage”—which is, therefore, what “we” are: “human beings who struggle for their vitality and mortality.”37 For Cixous, then, writing also means being on the other side of what is passing by, that is, engaging from the perspective of language in conversation with every opposite, even oxymoronic movement and change on which our existence “is based, in and out of movement, as our steps go on, proceeding over the course of time,” so to speak, “in the manner of grounding propositions („grund-sätzlich“ i.e., basically).”38 The text, her text, has to be heard; it has music in itself and is not immediately legible, understandable, because it has hidden meanings. Yet how must “the impetuously unreserved writing of a book proceed without any anticipation of art and determination, so as to write in complete clarity nonetheless?”39 In Cixous’s writing thinking, everything happens by way and as a result of a triad between staging, keeping, and safekeeping, in the center of which stands one I: not an I as the first, defined and defining person, though, but an I as an undefined pronoun, as something staged, spread out over multiple pronominal nooks, that is, an I as a persona amidst other personae, an I that is never the primary I. The deconstruction of the I. Calle formulates it in this way: “No order. Everything is cardinal. Or rather, what is cardinal is this putting into pronoun—there for the name, in its place—this infinite and indefinite displacing of what belongs in proper, of the subject.”40 In the “subject”—if there can even been any talk of it at all, and if so then preferably put between quotation marks—what is active and what is passive are lost and woven together: it is “subject of, subject to slippage. Less possessor than possessed—with the demon of writing.”41 In this move, the In-I that is staged is shown to be opposite to the In-itself, to be antipodal to any dense substance or coincidence whatsoever. The In-I that is staged is written incidentally and coincidentally and is connected to visibility, alterability, and otherness. According to Calle, it is like a mobile that possesses no self-presence and no fixed form. “The in-I is a place of intuitions, of roles, of representations as the only possibility of knowledge: it leads to a writing of interruption and separation; it leads the writer to make the ‘self-portraits of a blind woman.’”42 Cixous therefore asks: “Why do I speak of the author as if she were not me? Because she isn’t me. She departs from me and goes where I don’t want to go.”43 As a writer, to be sure, I put myself into the game in my staging, yet at the same time I am also gaming myself. “I cannot write without distracting my gaze from capturing. I write by distraction. Distracted. Whenever I go off (writing is first of all a departure, an embarkation, an expedition) I slip away from the diurnal world and diurnal sociality, with a simple magic trick: I close my eyes, my ears.

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And presto: the moorings are broken. At that instant I am no longer of this political world. It is no more. Behind my eyelids I am Elsewhere. Elsewhere there reigns the other light. I write by the other light.”44 I end up stretched between scription and diction, fiction and fragmentation, textual effects and stimuli, between “the slowness of the calligraphy organizing the page and the telegraphic surprise of the meaning ‘in flashes,’ illumination. The work being born and nourishing itself from a handicap that is the essence of the writer’s gesture: ‘we toil for months to copy down the flash of lightning,’ we who ‘are made of a star on the end of a stick.’”45 Writing, then, means making the necessary connection of opposites, the connection internal to the text, through which its structure—its premise located in writing and not writing—is constituted. Relations are inscribed, my thinking is resituated in the text and, going forward, literally belongs to the corpus of language, to its objective body. If over the course of this thinking writing a “truth” emerges, then in the case of Calle and in line with Cixous, it can be understood as an aesthet(h) ics: “where the two h’s make aesthetics be read with ethics. In this way, the contradictory knot where meanings stumble is reinscribed, in infinite constellations.”46 In this way, her text becomes the site for critical analyses, where the I is incessantly staged and playing at something, where fiction grounds reality, invention truth, theatricality life. “Between the two [. . .] there is the space of a no head. A going back over, an ironing, a writing with the head cut off. With emotion. Between writing and thinking, the affective beating—syncopation.”47 The first model or nearest object you can observe is you yourself. 8.3 THE ANTECEDENCE OF OTHERS In her writing, Cixous frequently addresses autobiografictions, which do not follow any constantly applied narrative perspective and thus, above all, no singular I, preferring their own, personal I, which also means recognizing that every I in the autobiography cannot stand for itself alone. From birth forward, I am not for myself alone but always already in relationships with Others: my parents, my adoptive parents, my doctors and caretakers, my siblings, my grandparents, and so forth. Instead, in regard of these perspectives, even toward fictions, Cixous switches and duplicates, staging the I, her I, so as to have the entire text develop in a kind of openness, which in turn enables an openness for Others. “Autobiografiction,” Elisabeth Schäfer writes in this context, “thus deconstructs both the authorship and the telos of a text by laying open the fact that every text always already comes from others and is always already consigned to others. In this sense autobiografiction is

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not private—not for oneself alone. It is always already subjected to a kind of openness, to being-with-Others (Mitsein), and to Others, as well as permeated by them; at its heart, autobiografiction is political.”48 For this praxis of autobiografiction as well as its subversive potential, we have an exemplary excerpt from Cixous’s book The Day I Wasn’t There. The passage does not just concern the arrival, appearance, and disappearance of her child, who returns to her memory decades after their death: “I have just checked Adolf Eichmann’s date of birth. He was born on the nineteenth of March nineteen hundred and six. What a relief. It would have infected me if his day were close to a day devoted to someone dear to me, I thought to myself. And right away it upset me to catch myself fearing being upset by it. I fear taking ill, but what I fear most is fear itself which drags me down and consents to a crime or other power of appropriation. The contagion is there, undetectable. You can’t get rid of it. I still see my doctor father scrubbing his hands for ages, whipping up a blessed white foam under the top. What detergent for what touches us by the internal contact, voluptuous, terrifying, hot coals of the mind?”49 Here Cixous is apparently or ostensibly narrating from the perspective of her experiencing I, as a character, observing from the view of herself as the nearest object, and instantly ends up in a situation in which she is no longer just by herself, alone, but one in which she comes upon Others instead. Whilst contemplating, she thinks of Adolf Eichmann, the lieutenant colonel in the SS who is coculpable for the Holocaust, and looks at his date of birth. Relieved that his birth does not coincide with that of persons dear to her, she lands on a roller coaster of emotions, for it displeases her to have thought so at all, to have yielded to that fear. In this way, from the view of her purportedly personal, defined, and defining persona, Cixous opens a space that goes above and beyond her, setting herself no longer as the primary object but, rather, the Other—in this case, Eichmann, whose date of birth provides her relief as well as displeasure, among other things. This space furthermore is developed into one in which in her imagination even something evil could happen to her, as her fear weakens her and she acquiesces to a crime or to another force of unabashed confidentiality. Why look at a person’s date of birth, why does Cixous look at this person’s date of birth? Is this date a confidential piece of information and, having it, do I enter into a confidential relationship with the person whose date of birth I know from now on? Questions that, in the case of Cixous, lead to being entangled in them in an act of thinking writing, to giving free run to a kind of stream-of-consciousness, if an interruption were not to ensue from Cixous. For what follows her and our infection with this fiction is the appearance of her father who, she writes, would always carefully wash his hands with soap, and in so doing asking what kind of soap would there be for that which

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affects us through internal contact, lust, terror, mental inferno. The father washes his hands so as not to have himself infected by patients and in order not to infect his daughter. Do we have any soap with which we can prevent that which affects us through internal contact, lust, terror, mental inferno? Could Cixous have prevented landing on this roller coaster of emotions about a Nazi and her father by way of the former’s date of birth? In this respect, she herself continues: “It’s this human porosity that bothers me and that I can’t escape since it is the fault of my skin, the extra sense which is everywhere in my being, this lack of eyelids on the face of the soul, or perhaps this imaginary lack of imaginary lids, this excessive facility I have for catching others, I am caught by persons or things animated or unanimated that I don’t even frequent, and even the verb catch I catch or rather am caught by it, for, note this please, it’s not I who wish to change, it’s the other who gets his hooks in me for lack of armor.”50 Cixous is exposed to this human permeability, for via her skin too much sense infiltrates her, infects her, taints her, and spreads across her entire Being. She cannot elude it or even close her eyes to it, neither in any corporeal or in any mental presence, whether brought forth from memory or conjured up with imagination. In the case of Eichmann, this is the crux of her textual labor, for she shows herself to be ready to take up even him, the Nazi, as a result of her excessive receptivity, by thinking of his date of birth. She catches him for herself or falls into his trap, because he also has access to her, for he is antecedent to her and was already there. With his crimes, Eichmann has built himself up before the vision of her soul and, for lack of eyelids, she cannot close her eyes to him. She therefore lacks protection from him as well as from Others. From that point, Cixous continues: “All it takes is for me to be plunged for an hour or less into surroundings where the inevitable occurs—café, bus, hair salon, train carriage, recording studio—there must be confinement and envelopment, and there I am stained intoxicated, practically any speaker can appropriate my mental cells and poison my sinuses, shit, idiocies, cruelties, vulgar spite, trash, innumerable particles of human hostility inflame the windows of my brain and I get off the transport sick for days.”51 Cixous’s life is intertwined with the lives of Others. There is not any one life, neither that of Cixous nor that of any one Other. There are only many lives, of which none can be seen as one entity but, rather, as being irrevocably intertwined with the lives of Others, even in the more narrow sense that the lives of Others are always already antecedent to my life, always preempt me. Cixous lays this open here, even in the broader sense that Others can come toward me not only in a friendly way but also inimically, whether in word or deed. Cixous views this alterity as inevitable yet stresses, too, that in her reflection and her disclosure she shows herself to be especially accessible to it. “It isn’t the fault

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of one Eichmann or another. I admit to being guilty of excessive receptivity to mental miasma. The rumor of a word poisons me for a long time. Should I read or hear such a turn of phrase or figure of speech, right away I can’t breathe my mucous membranes swell up, my lips go dry, I am asthmaticked, sometimes I lose my balance and crash to the ground, or on to a chair if perchance one is there, in the incapacity of breathing the unbreathable.”52 Pathos of other persons, pathos of their deeds, their language and words. “That human phrases or even a word carry doses of maleficence is well established. People are venerated by nations for a belch or two. The poison circulates via points of resemblance or coincidence between all animated beings and more particularly by the word I which is in every mouth.”53 Cixous applies her pen and her writing as antidote, which causes the Other to appear, concepts to disappear, roles to disintegrate, so as to enable a change in human relationships, in thinking, in all ways of acting. Every sentence and every speech act is above all about en-livening, bringing forth, and pre-tending the Other. Included in this is also setting the I in motion only as something staged, not allowing it to be at rest, let alone hardening in itself, because in the end that excludes Others. “Every time I hear someone else say I, it’s the alert. Secretly I watch out I tremble I am fingered, I make myself dig a trench I am the bird aware of the hostility of the cat who is after me. But, at the same moment I am the cat aware that the bird is aware of the hostility I feel for him. It’s my lot, my good fortune, and my mischance, this oscillation of other.”54 The doctrine of perception of existence developed from the perspective of the Other. “We are all cut out of the immense bolt of being, a dreadful kinship for someone who does not know how to put a strict limit on connivance. One wink and you’ve reached a tacit agreement with the devil. No, no, no third lid! No hooded eye!”55 Accordingly, conceiving alterity in line with Cixous furthermore means making oneself conscious of the individual ways of being of each and every person, bringing them into language and onto paper, and thus causing the various intertwined relationships between persons to form, so as to admit of diverse ways of living, while at the same time, and by all means, keeping one’s eyes open in the act of writing thinking with the necessary as well as politically motivated disposition vis-à-vis Others. “Right away I found him very familiar this man, this Eichmann I’ve known him for ages, I’ve met him often, he is a sincere man, crafty and sincere, one can only admire how composed his attitude is, a man who knows how to paint his character, because he likes himself the way he is, neither more nor less than antipathetic a little abandoned, a little disappointing and therefore disappointed to have disappointed himself, but German, but still, geputzt, boot-licking clean, he is still handsome though fifteen or sixteen years have gone by since the events his skin is not yet wrinkled, his mouth is still neatly outlined, although he risks the death penalty, unaware as he is

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that being deadalready he risks nothing, and it is this deadalready and this kept under glass that make him fascinating: Here you have a dead man who doesn’t know it yet. Like so many others under glass. He follows it all with attention and patience. The Obedient. Determined to be obedient. Specialized in obedience. Good in grammar. The only slip, it’s that he mixed up Cholm and Chelmo which in reality is Kolm or Kolmhof but he isn’t the only one who doesn’t know if Cholm is Kolm or not and if yes or not it was Chelmo in the Wäthergau where he was sent to oversee some phases of extermination about which he made a report in report language to Müller his superior. The question remains in suspense. Was he condemned to death in the end? The question remains.”56

Chapter 9

The Event of Hospitality

In July 1997, a few days before a joint appearance onstage at La Villette in Paris, the jazz musician Ornette Coleman met with the philosopher Jacques Derrida for a talk where they both spoke at great length, whereas their subsequent appearance would fail entirely: when Coleman interrupted his saxophone playing to let Derrida speak, the audience lost patience with the philosopher after just a few sentences, interrupting him and booing him off the stage.1 As a result, Derrida necessarily left the event in silence. In this unfinished lecture as well as in the previously completed conversation, Coleman and Derrida are primarily concerned with what constitutes music and language: the art of improvisation underlying both. OC: I don’t know if it’s true for language, but in jazz you can take a very old piece and do another version of it. What’s exciting is the memory that you bring to the present. What you’re talking about, the form that metamorphoses into other forms, I think it’s something healthy, but very rare. JD: Perhaps you will agree with me on the fact that the very concept of improvisation verges upon reading, since what we often understand by improvisation is the creation of something new, yet something which doesn’t exclude the prewritten framework that makes it possible. OC: That’s true. JD: I am not an “Ornette Coleman expert,” but if I translate what you are doing into a domain that I know better, that of written language, the unique event that is produced only one time is nevertheless repeated in its very structure. Thus there is a repetition, in the work, that is intrinsic to the initial creation—that which compromises or complicates the concept of improvisation. Repetition is already in improvisation: thus when people want to trap you between improvisation and the prewritten, they are wrong. OC: Repetition is as natural as the fact that the earth rotates.2

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What connects Coleman and Derrida in their conversation is an interest in a concept that is grounded in the jazz aesthetic, which can open up its room for playing only within the limits of convention. The jazz musician improvises and invents only on the basis of preset harmonies and melodies. In the process, their improvisation proves to be constrained, one that even follows a canon. Roland Borgards points out that this jazz and its attachment to convention, as well as in its relation to writing, plays out as a relative of composition.3 Coleman, on the other hand, is a representative for Free Jazz and therefore seems to renounce any attachments. His improvisation is free and portrays the opposite of what is constrained. It is inclined more toward voice than toward writing. Yet from where does Coleman improvise, and in what direction? Is his playing something random without rules? 9.1 PRAXIS OF IMPROVISATION For Derrida, the event of the saxophone playing during Coleman’s appearance is one that can be compared to writing while in the actual act of writing. Both achieve their singularity only as a result of the fact that they contain elements of repeatability without which they could not be recognized as such. Thus, they underlie precedents of rules, laws, codes, practices, or rehearsals, whereby the French term for a musical rehearsal, la répétition, brings this connection to the fore, for it brings together elements of repetition and practice, as Borgards puts forth.4 Derrida’s trick in working with terminology here lies in the comparison to a scheme for reading in a metaphysical manner, one that also follows the concept of composition, which consists exactly of those elements that until now were assumed for improvisation. In this way, both ideas—improvisation as well as composition—do not appear as opposites but are instead connected to each other and are reciprocally constituted. “Writing and event, provision and free improvisation are not opposed to each other but, rather, originate from each other, inasmuch as not only writing but the event, too, presupposes the potential for repetition. Free Jazz, too, relies on rehearsal, repetition, la répétition.”5 For Coleman, this manner of reading means that his free improvisation is not the expression of extraordinary freedom but, rather, one of unconditional self-restraint, for it has its presuppositions in the aforesaid precedents of rules, laws, codes, practices, or rehearsals. Even Coleman’s pieces are based on something written and can become jazz standards. Coleman’s free improvisation, therefore, is not one of any original sort of freedom whatsoever, let alone one of the autonomous self-expression of a creative subject. It is not, say, like that—in the reading of Heinrich von Kleist—of the “thunderbolt” from Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti de Mirabeau on

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June 23, 1789, as a result of which the French monarchy found itself overthrown: after the king ordered its dissolution, the Master of Ceremonies for the Estates-General ran into resistance, for Mirabeau challenged him with a speech in which he called on the estates, and not the king, to be representatives of the French nation, which would contribute to the storming of the Bastille a few weeks later. Kleist chooses this speech of Mirabeau as an example for his exposition On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking, in which he takes a performative situation as his point of departure: “It is a strangely inspiring thing to have a human face before us as we speak; and often a look announcing that a half-expressed thought is already grasped gives us its other half’s expression. I believe many a great speaker to have been ignorant when he opened his mouth of what he was going to say. But the conviction that he would be able to draw all the ideas he needed from the circumstances themselves and from the mental excitement they generated made him bold enough to trust to luck and make a start.”6 It is in the face of Others that Mirabeau’s speech unfolds, during the course of which he finds himself in corporeal copresence with Others and is able to rely on, to have recourse to that which he has said in other speeches, that which he has experienced in exchange with Others. The gradual production of his thoughts while speaking goes back to it and develops notions that are made concrete, are formed into phrases that are pronounced. With Kleist, Mirabeau swings to a peak of presumptuousness and is thus able to resist the abrogation of the Conseil d’État. As such, Kleist describes a performative situation that is gradually differentiated. What is initially verbalized as not being intended by the speaker, out of contingent necessity, follows a course of its own dynamic, which increasingly determines what is happening and with its surprising turn toward resistance proves to be necessary following the speech. “We read that Mirabeau as soon as the Master of Ceremonies had withdrawn stood up and proposed (i) that they constitute themselves a national assembly at once, and (ii) declare themselves inviolable.”7 Mirabeau’s words do not just follow deeds; Mirabeau’s words are already deeds. They correspond to a praxis of improvisation that is enacted and becomes effective by way of an unprepared, unexpected, and unforeseen act in the Here and Now. Does Mirabeau, then, begin his speech without purpose or plan, and does he only come to any awareness of what he is saying and doing during the course of that speech, during its execution? In the context of this process, Kleist emphasizes a vague “unconsciousness” that creeps into the activity of the speaker or the artist in bringing forth a speech or an artwork. Thus adopted, the praxis of improvisation takes the place of any definite “consciousness” of the one speaking or the one creating art, whereby the assumption of a creative genius or any autonomous subjectification is called into question. In this way, Kleist also turns against any logocentrism in the aesthetics of his age (Kant)

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and prefers, therefore, an absolute spiritlessness as opposed to positing any absolute spirit. What also becomes clear, then, is that this line of thought not only concerns an aesthetic project but also a political one, for Mirabeau comes to an understanding, together with Others, about a collective undertaking: change in the absolutely dominant vertical order, which is subsequently organized horizontally by joint agreement. With the aid of Kleist, an understanding of democracy emerges by way of the praxis of improvisation. In the case of Coleman and Derrida, that understanding is further differentiated in exemplary fashion in musical activity, for in Coleman’s group, activity amongst and with Others was likewise organized horizontally; his Free Jazz advocates a joint project, A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet, as the subtitle of the corresponding album reveals. Jointly playing with his band members, in a four-part conversation by way of sound, Coleman subjects himself to a responsive intermediate happening in a musical space for alterity, in which the call (Anspruch) and response (Antwort) of everyone involved with the music constitutes the improvisation with all its similarly intercorporeal implications and their topical and habitual dimensions, for it is only from these that improvisation can arise at all. The talk between Coleman and Derrida, however, further focuses on musical activity as something that is organized horizontally. For Coleman, moreover, it is a matter of developing a concept that allows one thing to be translated into another. In this context, he draws attention to the fact that sounds have a much more democratic relationship to information, because one does not need any alphabet to understand music.8 Everyone freely has direct access to sounds, to music, which does not have any leader for Coleman, not even in the composer who is undermined. Thus, with Derrida, Free Jazz turns into a political programme, in which a sovereign is seen standing opposite democracy and shifting their sole decision-making power toward a freedom in deciding for many. The sound is not specified by one but, rather, by many. Going forward, the sound can be changed by taking Others into consideration. Thus, freedom becomes the effect of collective playing in the communal space of alterity, in which Everyone is related and self-restrained in free improvisation, so as to allow Others, too, to set the tone. This shift does not just apply to the sound, though, but also to the speech (la parole) that Derrida apprehends in his encounter with the Algerian philosopher Mustapha Chérif, the words that are addressed to the Other, who is thus recognized as an Other, in their Otherness. “This speech addressed to the other presupposes the freedom to say anything, on the horizon of a democracy to come that is not directed to the nation, the State, religion, which is not even connected to language. Naturally, the religion of the other must be recognized and respected, as well as his mother tongue, of course. But one must translate,

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that is, at the same time respect the language of the other and, through that respect, get his meaning across, and this presupposes what you have called a universal democracy.”9 Democracy is always to come, it is a promise, and it is precisely in the name of this promise that what pretends to be de facto democracy can always criticized. In this way Derrida pursues the conviction that there is no democracy anywhere in the world that corresponds to democracy to come. Any conversation about democracy to come must therefore be distinguished by an unconditional openness, for its event and its promise lie ahead of us and as a result allow us to criticize at any moment. By democracy, Derrida understands a social organization, in which everyone is justified in criticizing the state of what is called democratic. “This is how one recognizes a democracy: the right to say everything, the right to criticize the allegation, or the so-called democracy, in the name of a democracy to come.”10 In this way, views on new international legislation and renewed international institutions can be given freely; views that are roaming around in the public space and, in particular, capture the fact that the democracy to come wavers there endlessly between two possibilities, without being able to take a decision, oscillating eternally: it can, on the one hand, correspond to a neutral and constant conceptual analysis, by my mentioning the word “democracy” more than using it, or I can furthermore designate it as a performative utterance with which I attempt to impart my conviction that it will come to pass, that we have to believe in it regardless. “The to of the ‘to come’ wavers between imperative injunction (call or performative) and the patient perhaps of messianicity (nonperformative exposure to what comes, to what can always not come or has already come).”11 According to Derrida, both possibilities and positions can be alternated with each other, be directed toward us one after the other, or in the same instant perturb each other, allowing each other no moment’s rest and thus alternating respectively as the alibi of the other. In writing that to us, in making us attend to his ability to play alternately or simultaneously with these two positions or turns, Derrida withdraws into the secret of a kind of irony, acquiring an ironic distance. “[I]s it not also democracy that gives the right to irony in the public space? Yes, for democracy opens public space, the publicity of public space, by granting the right to a change of tone (Wechsel der Töne), to irony as well as to fiction, the simulacrum, the secret, literature, and so on. And, thus, to a certain nonpublic public within the public, to a res publica, a republic where the difference between the public and the nonpublic remains an indecidable limit. There is something of a democratic republic as soon as this right is exercised.”12 As Borgards adds here, as soon as this right is applied, improvisation occurs.13 “This indecidability is, like freedom itself, granted by democracy, and it constitutes, I continue to believe, the only radical possibility of deciding and of making come about [faire

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advenir] (performatively), or rather of letting come about [laisser advenir] (metaperformatively), and thus of thinking what comes about or happens and who happens by, the arriving of whoever arrives.”14 The indecidability is also granted by improvisation; like democracy to come and like freedom, it is an act of working on the future and opens up a disquieting experience that is both threatened and threatening, should it remain in its “perhaps.” It is therefore also connected with a responsibility that surpasses all measure and from which nobody can withdraw. What Derrida proposes in this way is thinking also of improvisation as a process that interacts with a democracy to come as well as with philosophy and its repeating and varying texts, and which is directed toward a desirable future that we can believe in, that we have to fight for, and that we can nevertheless doubt at any time. Every theory thus turns into a kind of praxis. 9.2 MONOLINGUALISM FROM THE OTHERS’ PERSPECTIVE OC: What I mean is that the differences between man and woman or between races have a relation to the education and intelligence of survival. Being Black and a descendent of slaves, I have no idea what my language of origin was. JD: If we were here to talk about me, which is not the case, I would tell you that, in a different but analogous manner, it’s the same thing for me. I was born into a family of Algerian Jews who spoke French, but that was not really their language of origin. I wrote a little book on this subject, and in a certain way I am always in the process of speaking what I call the “monolingualism of the other.” I have no contact of any sort with my language of origin, or rather that of my supposed ancestors. OC: Do you ever ask yourself if the language that you speak now interferes with your actual thoughts? Can a language of origin influence your thoughts? JD: It is an enigma for me. I cannot know it. I know that something speaks through me, a language that I don’t understand, that I sometimes translate more or less easily into my “language.” I am of course a French intellectual, I teach in French-speaking schools, but I have the impression that something is forcing me to do something for the French language.15

Time and again in the conversation with Derrida, Coleman goes back and forth between asking about what was and is and about what is possible, so as to think through his own role as an artist, as a musician, too, so as to reflect on to what extent jazz can also have a political function, to what extent his improvisations might also serve a process that Derrida further conceives for

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democracy to come. Both of them, however, are occupied not only with these questions but also with questions about the relationship between genders; about their own respective origins; about repression, violence, and racism. In multiple moves seeking to answer these questions, Derrida becomes vehemently involved in the present text of the conversation, even if according to his own statement he does not intend to do so. The question about gender relationships, which for Derrida is a question of gender difference, is answered, even if not in detail in the conversation with Coleman, yet thoroughly in Derrida’s work nonetheless by way of text. That is, it finds an answer in writing and reading, by way of a fabulous, fantastic potential for discourse and via a kind of poeticity of language, which with its productivity and permeability lays open the trace of an internal latitude that, as Calle puts forward, could help to solve “blocked (or supposedly so, albeit with advantages and disadvantages) gender duality.”16 With help from Cixous, in particular, Derrida reads gender difference in the sense of a story lying before us, a fable, an interpretation, and thus also in the sense of a way of reading, which “gives all its attention to the fantastic story that has been told to us since forever, to the story that says that he, in distinction to her, he who is separated, who loves in the imagination (fiction) and in discontinuity, in remoteness and transcendence.”17 It is especially through Cixous that Derrida learns to read gender difference, for he adopts a significant line from Cixous and her novel Jours de l’an (again, translated into English as: First Days of the Year): Tous les deux. Both of them. Derrida reads and writes: “‘Tous les deux’ can be understood now always also as all ‘two (of them),’ ale pairs, duals and duels, duos, differences, all dyads of the world: every appearance of two in the world. Such a plural bears a name that is singular in both senses of the word, uniting in the meantime pairs and dual entitities. In a manner of speaking, ‘tous les deux’ becomes the subject or the origin of the fable, along with its (hi)story and morality. The fable tells everything that can befall gender difference, everything that can fall to it or originate from gender difference.”18 Tous les deux. This formulation from Cixous can also be adopted in order to transition from Derrida’s reading of gender difference to speaking one’s own language, which Derrida handles in the conversation with Coleman by referring to his own biography, his being born into a Jewish-Algerian family that speaks French, that speaks French with him, a French that is not really the mother tongue of any of them, of his family and him. Tous les deux. As he mentions to Coleman, Derrida thematizes this mélange in his book Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, which begins with a fabricated conversation: “Picture this, imagine someone who would cultivate the French language. What is called the French language. Someone whom the French language would cultivate. And who, as a French citizen,

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would be, moreover, a subject of French culture, as we say. Now suppose, for example, that one day this subject of French culture were to tell you in good French: ‘I only have one language; it is not mine.’”19 This subject, this I, is concerned with itself, speaks French, cultivates the language, cares for it, and lives it in French culture, which affects the I in return, which for its part is part of French culture. The subject continues: “I am monolingual. My monolingualism dwells, and I call it my dwelling; it feels like one to me, and I remain in it and inhabit it. It inhabits me. The monolingualism in which I draw my very breath is, for me, my element. Not a natural element, not the transparency of the ether, but an absolute habitat. It is impassable, indisputable: I cannot challenge it except by testifying to its omnipresence in me. It would always have preceded me. It is me. For me, this monolingualism is me.”20 In this observation, Derrida sees a sort of inexhaustible solipsism, for monolingualism constitutes me; I am it even before me and, to be sure, in perpetuity. Yet in spite of this monolingualism constituting the I, despite its preceding the Self, Derrida makes the speaker, the subject, say that although he has just this one language, it is still not theirs, and furthermore: it was and will never be theirs. In other words, this means that Derrida is highlighting a split that is at hand in spite of the interrelationship and reciprocal cultivation of I and language, a division that cannot be sublated and makes the possession of one’s own language impossible. If the language is not mine, it can be concluded, then it belongs in a space of alterity, then this language is the language of the Other. From this logic, Jürgen Trabant concludes that “in that case, of course, my monolingualism [is] also the monolingualism of the other or a monolingualism from the other. . . . The other is not the subject of monolingualism; instead, it is the site from which monolingualism comes.”21 Said another way, it can be stated that we come to learn the mother tongue in hearing it as a language of Others, one that preempts our own speech; just as Cixous’ autobiografictions make clear that every I does not stand for itself alone and is also able to speak. From birth forward, I am not for myself alone but am always already relating to Others, hear them speaking and learn to talk. Thus it is also a matter of understanding monolingualism not only from the Other but from the Alien as well, from that which I do not possess, do not own. The language that Derrida is talking about, Trabant writes, “is simultaneously with the I and elsewhere; it belongs simultaneously to the space of the I and the other. The one language simultaneously an other, or: monolingualism is simultaneously an other lingualism. Indeed, it is even a rather particularly radical and in any case particularly painful form of an other lingualism. For the Other is not outside but, rather, in the inside of the speaker. The other lingualism of the monolingual is an internal split, a kind of schizolingualism. This division, the non-belonging of the one language to the speaker in the case of simultaneous belonging is painful.”22 As is already

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indicated in the conversation with Coleman in Derrida, this pain is also connected with his autobiography as a Jew born in Algeria in 1930, which goes hand in hand with the 1940 prohibition imposed by the Vichy régime to strip the French Jews in Algeria of their citizenship and ban their children from going to school. Derrida was thus forbidden from cultivating or appropriating the French language; it does not belong to him but to the Others instead. Elias Canetti, on the other hand, describes a painful experience having to do with another appropriation of a language. In his childhood memoir The Tongue Set Free, he recounts how as a Jew from Bulgaria in Manchester, England, he learned German from his mother, because for her it was a language of intimate familiarity, one that she conversed in with her deceased husband, his father, in “loving conversations.” For the son, German became a mother tongue in a very literal sense: “It was a sublime period that commenced. Mother began speaking German to me outside the lessons. I sensed that I was close to her again, as in those weeks after Father’s death. It was only later that I realized it hadn’t just been for my sake when she instructed me in German with derision and torment. She herself had a profound need to use German with me, it was the language of her intimacy. The dreadful cut into her life, when, at twenty-seven, she lost my father, was expressed most sensitively for her in the fact that their loving conversations in German were stopped. Her true marriage had taken place in that language. She didn’t know what to do, she felt lost without him, and tried as fast as possible to put me in his place. She expected a great deal from this and found it hard to bear when I threatened to fail at the start of her enterprise. So, in a very short time, she forced me to achieve something beyond the strength of any child, and the fact that she succeeded determined the deeper nature of my German; it was a belated mother tongue, implanted in true pain. The pain was not all, it was promptly followed by a period of happiness, and that tied me indissolubly to that language.”23 Taking pain still as the point of departure, Derrida formulates it differently at first: “Yet it will never be mine, this language, the only one I am thus destined to speak, as long as speech is possible for me in life and in death; you see, never will this language be mine. And, truth to tell, it never was. You at once appreciate the source of my sufferings, the place of my passions, my desires, my prayers, the vocation of my hopes, since this language runs right across them all.”24 In other words this schizolingualism, then, also reveals that the French language is a language that comes from elsewhere for Derrida, namely, from Paris, across the Mediterranean Sea, especially as a written and literary language as well, which is learned and cultivated across that geographical and cultural distance, under colonial circumstances. So it was always already elsewhere; there was always already an alterity inscribed in it.

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In this way, the monolingualism of the Other can be further thought through taking into account a “prosthesis of origin,” too, as Derrida calls it in his subtitle. For by way of the Other’s monolingualism, I must determine myself outside of my Self, also in the sense of prosthetizing as proposing, as a consequence of which I bring myself forward, move ahead, so as to determine myself anew. David Wills conceives of this moving ahead together with an act of masking, which happens in Descartes by way of a shameful I (ego prudeo): before itself this I—like a shameful stage actor who, so as to hide their shame in ascending from the spectator’s seat in the orchestra pit to the theatre stage, is masked with a mask, which in ascending they hold of them, and which is not theirs—this shameful I is already a masked I (ego larvatus), for it is already masked with an other mask that is its own, namely, that of its shame.25 Was this mask always already there, from birth? Is it shaped socially or culturally? Can nature and culture be distinguished with it and in it any longer? “I go forward putting a mask in front of me; I put both my mask and my body out in front, my mask out in front of my body and my body out in front of itself. As soon as I move up and out in front of myself, before I put on the transformative mask, I am moving myself into otherness, something that is explicitly reinforced here by the metamorphosis from spectator to actor and from an inferior, or common, situation to an elevated one. Concentrated in the ego larvatus prudeo is thus an I that reveals itself as originary prosthesis, an I that moves forward out of itself and so opens the space and structure of masking, masks itself with its own prospective otherness, on the basis of which it is capable of putting on a mask.”26 In Derrida, this forward move from out of oneself can also be understood as a movement that recognizes that he does not have any second language (like Arabic, for example) behind the one language, French. As a French Jew, there is still no return for Derrida to a Jewish language that Kafka dreams of when Kafka writes of Yiddish, which “he places in opposition to his father’s own/alien language, to German,” as Trabant also points out.27 In his forward move, Derrida takes time for himself to consider additional Jewish experiences with the language and, in a twenty-page-long footnote, correlates his hypotheses in which, by his own statement, the proclamation of a taxonomy or typology might be seen, which might go by the title The Monolingualism of the Host: Jews of the Twentieth Century, the Mother Tongue, and the Language of the Other, on Both Sides of the Mediterranean.28 “From the coast of this long note, it is as if I were taking in the view of the other shore of Judaism, on another other coastline of the Mediterranean, in places that, in another way, are even more alien to me than Christian France.”29 The thinkers whom Derrida subsequently takes up into his typology are all Ashkenazic Jews from northern, eastern, and central Europe, to whom Derrida is devoted by way of the diverse forms of their biographical situation,

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with their thinking and its impacts, their respective “adventures.” They include among others—besides Kafka and his dream of returning to a Jewish language—Cixous, with whose help Derrida views all the derivations from his typology to be linked, which recreates Cixous in the direction of an as yet unnamed future, as well as Levinas and Hannah Arendt. As for Levinas, he “grants what he says about French in his/its own history first to the language of philosophy. The language of Greek affiliation is capable of accommodating all meaning from elsewhere, even from a Hebraic revelation. Which is another way of saying that language, and above all the ‘maternal’ idiom, is not the originary and irreplaceable place of meaning: a proposition that is, indeed, consistent with Levinasian thought of the hostage and substitution.”30 In the context of speech, according to Levinas, the encounter with Others becomes a linguistic relationship in which the Other does not remain a mere object mutely gazing at me but, rather, says something, speaks to me, eluding my capacity yet nevertheless calling for an answer. In doing so, what the Other says creates the moment of the linguistic relationship, which consists of my being spoken to as you, in the second-person singular. The response to it can only be given by me, in the first-person singular, whereupon any generalization is impossible, for nobody can respond in my place, for me, to the word of the Other. In Levinas, as Derrida puts forward, language is more expression than creation or foundation, for it encounters Levinas in its face, face to face, speaking: the appearance of the face is the first discourse. In this regard, Levinas develops an “Ethics of Ethics” for Derrida, one that attempts to determine the essence of the ethical relation in general.31 9.3 HOSPITALITY OF LANGUAGE Further developing this line of thought of an ethics of ethics, though, with his chosen focus on the monolingualism of the guest, Derrida is also engaged in the question of identity and so in the identity of the subject, before which the question of selfhood is posed, of course. “What is identity, this concept of which the transparent identity to itself is always dogmatically presupposed by so many debates on monoculturalism or multiculturalism, nationality, citizenship, and, in general, belonging? And before the identity of the subject, what is ipseity? The latter is not reducible to an abstract capacity to say ‘I,’ which it will always have preceded. Perhaps it signifies, in the first place, the power of an ‘I can,’ which is more originary than the ‘I’ in a chain where the ‘pse’ of ipse no longer allows itself to be dissociated from power, from the mastery and sovereignty of the hospes (here, I am referring to the semantic chain that works on the body of hospitality as well as hostility—hostis,

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hospes, hosti-pet, posis, despotes, potere, potis sum, possum, pote est, potest, pot sedere, possidere, compos, etc.).”32 Here, in following Emile Benveniste and his considerations on the vocabulary of Indo-European institutions, Derrida is disquieted by a complex play amongst interwoven etymological relationships, as part of which Benveniste moves onto semantic fields that, according to him, are related to a social fact, to an institution: it is hospitality.33 Taking as point of departure the basic Latin term of hospes, which can be translated as both guest and alien alike, Benveniste points to the fact that this concept is parsed into different parts that can be put together: hosti-pet-s. The middle part, -pet, alternates with pot-, which means “master,” which is why hospes also stands for “master of the guest.” Declined further with alterations, derivations like these—which Derrida calls attention to, along with Benveniste, as well as with Kant, for example—mean that I can never offer my hospitality (Gastfreundschaft, that is, friendliness toward guests), no matter how generous I make it, without simultaneously confirming that this place here, where I reside, my house, belongs to me; I welcome you, to be sure; however, please comply with the rules in my house; behave yourself as I specify them to you; attend to my selfhood, to what I am. By way of Kant, Derrida elaborates this “hospitality,” which Kant translates from Latin into German as Wirthbarkeit (hospitableness), and which Kant opposes to philanthropy in the third definitive article on perpetual peace, which starts with the heading that “Cosmopolitan right shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality”: “Here, as in the preceding articles, it is not a question of philanthropy but of right, so that hospitality (hospitableness) means the right of a foreigner not to be treated with hostility because he has arrived on the land of another.”34 From this elaboration results not only the fact that, with the German word Wirthbarkeit (hospitableness), hospitality not just opens up the field of (household) economics and those who maintain it, of its hosts; and the space of oikonomia; and of house rules. It also means that an opposing pair creeps in: one between a guest received as an alien, treated as a friend and ally or as an enemy. Derrida asks how it might be comprehended as human and loving: “Does hospitality exist in interrogating the new arrival? Does it begin with the question addressed to the newcomer?”35 Derrida asks, too, how it might be comprehended tenderly toward children or those we love: “[W]hat is your name, what should I call you, I who am calling on you, I who want to call you by your name? What am I going to call you?”36 He goes on to ask himself and us: “Or does hospitality begin with the unquestioning welcome, in a double effacement, the effacement of the question and the name? Is it just and more loving to question or not to question? to call by the name or without the name? to give or to learn a name already given?”37 He wonders more precisely: “Does one give

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hospitality to a subject? to an identifiable subject? to a subject identifiable by name? to a legal subject? Or is hospitality rendered, is it given to the other before they are identified, even before they are (posited as or supposed to be) a subject, legal subject and subject nameable by their family name, etc.?”38 For Derrida, it is clear that the question of/into hospitality is also the the question of/into the question, in the way it is simultaneously also the question into the subject and into the name as hypothesis of descent. Furthermore, this question is one that arises between the law of hospitality as a universal singularity and the laws of hospitality as a structured multiplicity in different processes that divide and differentiate. In the midst of these, Derrida sees an irresolvable, nondialectizable antinomy or an irreconcilable opposition that prevails: between the law (singular) as one that is unconditional for unlimited hospitality, that is, “to give the new arrival all of one’s home and oneself, to give him or her one’s own, our own, without asking a name, or compensation, or the fulfilment of even the smallest condition” and the laws (plural), “those rights and duties that are always conditioned and conditional, as they are defined by the Greco-Roman tradition and even the Judeo-Christian one, by all of law and all philosophy of law up to Kant and Hegel in particular, across the family, civil society, and the State.”39 Derrida concludes that there is a kind of self-restraint or even self-contradiction in the law of hospitality: “As the renewed reinforcement of mastery and of selfhood in being at one’s home, hospitality is limited at is own threshold from the very start of the threshold; it always remains at its own threshold; it is master over the threshold—and so it forbids crossing the threshold, which it apparently allows to be crossed. Hospitality becomes the threshold. That is why we do not know, what it is and cannot know it, either. As soon as we do know it, we do not know any longer what it is actually, what the threshold of its actuality, its authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) is.”40 Thus hospitality also renders the opposite of what it seems to render; to a certain extent, it comes to a standstill at the threshold to its self, at the threshold that it in turn designates and constitutes, at its phenomenon and its essence simultaneously. What Derrida puts forth, nevertheless, is that hospitality is not this aporetic contradiction, such that there is none there where it is. On the contrary, he maintains that this seemingly also dead-end paralysis at the threshold “is” what needs to be crossed; “this ‘is’ is, so that hospitality will arrive from there. Hospitality can take place only beyond hospitality, in that one decides to let that hospitality come which is itself paralyzed at the threshold of what it ‘is.’”41 Hospitality is always arriving, though from an arrival that is never set at the present and will never be set as such. In this way, it is thought of from the future, from arriving; exactly like democracy to come and like freedom, it is an act of working on the future and opens up a disquieting experience that is both threatened and threatening, should it remain in its “perhaps.” It is

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therefore also connected with a responsibility that surpasses all measure and from which nobody can withdraw. The event of hospitality. As hospitality, it always is constantly preceding us as an event that happened and is happening simultaneously. We do not know, therefore, what hospitality is. Similarly, the monolingualism of the guest is found in this event-like conception of undecidability, for it is combined with the opportunity for a hospitality of language, which, as Michael Wetzel observes, “in its monologic structure nevertheless becomes aware of opening towards the Other and in speaking also always implies the promise of a language to come that is altering (verändernden) in terms of ‘othering’ (‚verandernden‘).”42 Therefore, it is always about an opening of what is one’s own for what is alien, about an opening of the Self for the Other. The mother tongue is a language that does not originally belong to me; it is a language originally foreign, alien to me— even if it is my mother’s, my father’s, my sister’s, among Others. Yet how can the perspective be understood that views my mother tongue, my German mother tongue, as autonomous and irreplaceable, as downright untouchable, even vis-à-vis the Germans responsible for the Holocaust? Derrida asks about it in his long footnote in Monolingualism of the Other, getting into, among other things, the ethics of Hannah Arendt’s language, whereby he considers the declarations from her conversation with Günter Gaus, which was broadcast by German television in 1964, under the title Was bleibt? Es bleibt die Muttersprache (What remains? The mother tongue remains.), “Arendt responds in a way that is at once disarmed, naive, and learned when she is interrogated about her attachment to the German language. Did she survive exile in America, her teaching, and her publications in Anglo-American, ‘even in the bitterest of times’? ‘Always,’ she said, plainly and without hesitation. The reply seems initially to consist in one word, immer. She always kept this unfailing attachment and this absolute familiarity. The ‘always’ precisely seems to qualify this time of language.”43 For Derrida, Arendt’s commitment to this remaining, emphatic “always” seems to say more than the fact that the mother tongue is always already there, more than the “always there” that is “always already there.” With these sorts of well-placed quotation marks and italics put into play, this persistent always that disturbs Derrida is also an indicator to him of the fact that “there is perhaps no experience of the ‘always’ and the ‘same’ there, as such, except where there is, if not language, at least some trace which allows itself to be represented by language: as if the experience of the ‘always’ and loyalty to the other as to oneself presupposed the unfailing fidelity to language; even perjury, lying, and infidelity would still presuppose faith in language; I cannot lie without believing and making believe in language, without giving credence to the idiom.”44 For Derrida, Arendt’s answer is not exhaustive; it does not suffice, for one should not just believe in the language that simply

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inhabits me without a trace, not “even in the bitterest of times.” If the word always is at all acceptable here, then only because there is always a time of Nazism before and after Nazism, even if it was mostly unleashed in-between, during the time involving Arendt. In her conversation with Gaus, however, Arendt continues: “Always. I was telling myself: what is to be done? It is really not the German language, after all, that has gone mad. And in the second place, nothing can replace the mother tongue.”45 In musing about this connection Arendt makes, Derrida appears to be almost at a loss: “But how can one think this supposed uniqueness—singularity, irreplaceability—of the mother (indestructible fantasy accredited by the second sentence) together with this strange question about a madness of language, an envisioned delirium excluded by the first sentence?”46 Derrida puts forth that Arendt has not negated the first question about the manner of her disposition but, rather, that she denies it. For it is in fact not the language that has gone mad, which is not possible at all, as she skeptically protests with what her common sense prompts her to say. Whom should one believe anymore? As Derrida follows Arendt’s line of thought: “Hence it is the subjects of this language, humans themselves, who are losing their minds: Germans, certain Germans who were once masters of the country and that language. Only those people had at that time become diabolical and frenetic. They have no power over the language. It is older than they; it will survive them and will continue to be spoken by Germans who will no longer be Nazis, even by non-Germans.”47 In a purportedly logical deduction, Arendt’s first sentence about the way she was disposed connects with the second sentence on the nonexistent replacement for the mother tongue as a consequence of the recognition of her common sense, that is: is it not downright necessary that the citizen who speaks in a mad language goes mad, a language in which the same words lose or pervert the meaning they supposedly have in common? Even if my mother is not mad, might we still not have a mad mother anyway (whereby the relationship to the mother is a kind of madness)? “The mother can become the madwoman of the home, the lunatic of the cell, of the place of substitution where one’s home [le chez-soi] is lodged, the cell or the place, the locality or location of one’s home [le chez-soi]. It can happen that a mother becomes mad, and that can certainly be a moment of terror. When a mother loses her reason and common sense, the experience of it is as frightening as when a king becomes mad. In both cases, what becomes mad is something like the law or the origin of meaning (the father, the king, the queen, the mother).”48 In the conversation with Gaus, after she has spoken of her mother tongue as being unsupplementable and irreplaceable, Arendt additionally says: “One can forget their mother tongue, that is true. I have examples of that around me and, moreover, these persons speak foreign languages much better than I do.

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I always speak with a very heavy accent, and often I happen not to express myself in an idiomatic fashion. They are, conversely, capable of it, but there we are dealing with a language in which one cliche expels the other because the productivity that one shows in one’s own language has been neatly cut off, as one forgets that language.”49 Gaus then asks whether forgetting the mother tongue would have been the result of a form of repression, which Arendt affirms. For forgetting the mother tongue, the substitution that replaces the mother tongue, could indeed possibly be the effect of repression. Derrida reformulates the answer in such a way that forgetting the mother tongue is about the site and the very potential for repression par excellence. At this juncture, Arendt mentions Auschwitz as the incision, as the incisive site, as what is the trenchant point for repression. Derrida makes it clear that even this name that names the event can stand for repression, even if the word remains a little vague and no doubt insufficient. Even so, it is capable of leading us without any trouble on the path of a logic, an economy, and a topic which come from the ego and the actually subjective consciousness. According to Derrida, furthermore, beyond a logic and a phenomenology of consciousness, that happens too seldom in the all too public ambit of contemporary speech. On multiple levels, Derrida works against the unique and unequivocal nature of the mother tongue, against its natural ownership and its absolute position, even in the sense of its supposedly offering just a remnant of belonging. As the language of Others, the “mother” tongue is the experience of expropriation or, worded even more broadly, of “ex-appropriation.”50 This experience also holds true for the language of the colonizer, of the master, of the hospes, of the Nazi: “[t]here is never any such thing as absolute appropriation or reappropriation. Because there is no natural property of language, language gives rise only to appropriative madness, to jealousy without appropriation. Language speaks this jealousy; it is nothing but jealousy unleashed. It takes its revenge at the heart of the law. The law that, moreover, language itself is, apart from also being mad. Mad about itself. Raving mad.”51 The discourse about the experience of expropriation or “ex-appropriation” of language results in a politics, a right, and an ethics; “let us even go so far as to say that it is the only one with the power to do it, whatever the risks are, precisely because the undecidable ambiguity runs those risks and therefore appeals to the decision where it conditions, prior to any program and even any axiomatics, the right and the limits of a right to property, a right to hospitality, a right to ipseity in general, to the ‘power’ of the hospes himself, the master and possessor, particularly of himself—ipse, compos, ipsissimus, despotes, potior, possidere, to cite in no particular order a chain reconstructed by Benveniste of which we were speaking earlier.)”52

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I have only one language and it is not mine. My “own” language is, for me, a language that cannot be assimilated [‘aneignen,’ literally: appropriated]. My language, the only one I hear myself speak and agree to speak, is the language of the Other.

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Hannah Arendt situates human life by way of a vita activa, an active life in a world of people and things, a world from which that life is never removed and which it does not transcend anywhere. According to Arendt, human life has become engaged with being active, with this vita activa, and that is why the world surrounding human beings, which everyone is born into, owes its existence to humankind, “which produced it, as in the case of fabricated things; which takes care of it, as in the case of cultivated land; or which established it through organization, as in the case of the body politic. No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.”1All human activities are determined by the fact that people live together with other human beings, whereby their activity is not even conceivable outside of human society. If Arendt introduces human life in this way as absolutely engaged and therefore active, how is it related to its also absolutely inactive and passive side? Is there, in line with Arendt, also a vita passiva that would belong to the human condition? How does human life attest directly or indirectly to the presence of other people? How does she conceive of what is held in common? Does she also conceive of what separates? 10.1 AMONGST OURSELVES The life of human beings on Earth is constituted for them as a result of three fundamental activities, which Arendt subsumes under the term “human condition”: laboring, fabricating, and acting. These activities correspond to the basic conditions under which people are able to live in general, whereby the activity of labor corresponds to the biological process of the objective body (Körper). As part of its spontaneous metabolism, growth, and decline, the body is nourished by things in nature, which its labor produces and prepares, so as to supply them as vital necessities to the living organism. “The human 161

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condition of labor is life itself,” as Arendt puts forward, while subsequently establishing fabricating as something against nature, as producing an artificial world of things where people are at home.2 “The basic condition that the activity of fabrication comes under is worldliness—namely, the reliance of human existence on representation and objectivity.”3 Acting is the only activity of the human condition that plays out directly between people. According to Arendt, it occurs without any mediation from matter, materials, and things. The basic condition that corresponds to action is “plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”4 In this passage, Arendt conceives of humans in the plural and views the conditioned nature of humankind in all its aspects as related to the political, whereby this nature is distinctly related once again to any sort of politics whatsoever as a result of plurality: it is not just the conditio sine qua non but, rather, the conditio per quam. Living means to abide amongst human beings (inter homines esse), and dying means to cease abiding amongst human beings (desinere inter homines esse). “Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”5 However, the conditions of human existence—life itself as well as the Earth, natality and mortality, worldliness and plurality—will never be able to explain “humankind” and answer the question of who or what we are, because none of these conditions absolutely conditions. Here, Arendt pursues conceiving of a plurality in a way that refrains from positing “humankind,” as in anthropology, for example. Instead, she goes after certain constellations that unconditionally keep this question suspended, codifying nothing while determining it in no way conceptually. We cannot really outrun our own shadow. As a consequence, even the concept of the vita activa is, according to Arendt, loaded and overloaded with traditional notions, which she traces back via antiquity and the Middle Ages into her present, in order to propose her version that accounts for every recognizable trait of humankind in its in-between state, in which we are understood and make ourselves understood in relation to something we have in common between us, as a result and for the sake of the world. Along the pathway toward such an understanding “amongst ourselves,” Arendt appropriates the concept of the vita activa and gradually posits it in contradiction to the tradition that determines it from the standpoint of the vita contemplativa. According to Arendt, the concept of the vita activa owes its origin to a specific historical constellation; she locates this origin in the public trial against Socrates, a conflict thus arising between a philosopher and the Greek polis. “Let us go back to the beginning and consider what the charge is that has made me so unpopular, and has encouraged Meletus to draw up this indictment. Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must

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read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and he makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example. It runs something like that.”6 Socrates pursues an insightful line of thinking, which proper action ought to follow, and employs it in his apologia in a self-determined way, too, during his public trail before his accuser Meletos and the citizens of Athens, in which he is accused of corrupting the youth and of being godless. He speaks about his disposition being for the good of the town, as becomes clear in reading his speech in Plato’s Apology of Socrates, whereas what emerges in Plato’s Crito is that he explains to his friends that he may not flee from the procedure against him and must instead suffer the death penalty for political reasons.7 Yet Socrates is incapable of convincing either his judges or his friends. For Arendt, Socrates’s failure is part of the tragedy that she takes away from Plato’s dialogues. The polis does not know where to begin with the philosopher, just as even the philosopher’s friends are unable to follow his political argumentation. An abyss opens up between philosophy and politics, which Arendt situates historically precisely in this trial and condemnation of Socrates, marking—in her opinion—the same turning point in the history of political thought as the trial and condemnation of Jesus in the history of the Christian religion. In this context, what is significant for Arendt in appropriating the concept of the vita activa is, first of all, that it raises the issue of whether human beings of the polis can exist at all outside of the polis; whether it is possible to live without belonging to any political organization, thus finding oneself in an apolitical state, even in the sense of a statelessness understood from her present situation. What is moreover significant for Arendt is the cleft that is opened here between thought and deed, and which has not closed again since. “All thinking activity that is not simply the calculation of means to obtain an intended or willed end, but is concerned with meaning in the most general sense, came to play the role of an ‘afterthought,’ that is, after action had decided and determined reality. Action, on the other hand, was relegated to the meaningless realm of the accidental and haphazard.”8 As part of this thinking—which favors forethought vis-à-vis afterthought—Arendt’s vita activa learns from Socrates, who would make the state more true by helping to bring the truths of the citizens into the world. Socrates stands in Athens’ marketplace, the agora, and finds himself amidst the opinions (doxai) of the public. There, he practices his philosophical midwifery, his maieutic, and with it would make apparent what Others are thinking while finding truth in their opinion (doxa). Doing so, he helps Others, whose opinion is connected with politics as glory and fame are, too, (doxa), connected with the public sphere in which anyone may appear and show who they are. I represent my

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opinion, show myself, and am seen and heard by Others. In the Greek way of thinking, my ability to do so is a privilege, which can be carried out in the public sphere, though not in the private household (oikos), for there I neither appear or shine but live in a hidden way, even if my wife and my children, my slaves and servants hear and see me. Deriving from my descent and my status, my public as well as predominantly male privilege therefore also privileges a few select persons over many excluded people, as Arendt knows—which is why her version of the vita activa of Socrates and his art becomes doubly significant: because everyone has their own particular doxa, their own particular perspective on the world, Socrates cannot act in any other way than to start out constantly with questions. He cannot know in advance what kind of “That’s how it seems to me” (dokei moi) I have. He therefore has to ascertain my position in the world we share, has to ask me, respond to me, and take me into consideration. Put another way, it means that nobody can know the doxa of the Other beforehand already, just as nobody can know on their own without any effort the truth that their own opinion harbors. In this sense, Socrates must attempt to talk things through (dialegesthai) with Others, which also develops his role as a philosopher; that task does not consist of administering the state but, rather, of permanently vexing its citizens, so as to improve their opinions (doxai), though not to educate them as in Plato. “To Socrates, maieutic was a political activity, a give-and-take, fundamentally on a basis of strict equality, the fruits of which could not be measured by the result of arriving at this or that general truth.”9 Instead, one starts upon the journey more in talking something through, more in talking about something, in opening up to Others in dialogue, and in making oneself understood about something. Arendt continues with Aristotle and his Nicomachean Ethics, noting that a community does not consist of equals from the outset; on the contrary, it is made up of persons who are different and unequal, who have other opinions. The community therefore is constituted from and, in fact, as part of a process of equalizing (isasthenai), in acts of exchange that are differentiated by means of an economy (in the exchange of monies, for example). “But happiness will need external prosperity also, since we are human beings; for our nature is not self-sufficient for study, but we need a healthy body, and need to have food and the other services provided.”10 In line with Aristotle, Arendt enumerates three ways of living in this context, among which those who are free may choose, because in contrast to the enslaved, though also to the artisan or merchant, they do not depend on life’s necessities and on life’s circumstances created by them: “the life of enjoying bodily pleasures in which the beautiful, as it is given, is consumed; the life devoted to the matters of the polis, in which excellence produces beautiful deeds; and the

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life of the philosopher devoted to inquiry into, and contemplation of, things eternal, whose everlasting beauty can neither be brought about through the producing interference of man nor be changed through his consumption of them.”11 It is only in this realm that freedom is manifested and opens up for the philosopher a contemplative way of living (bios theoretikos), which lands in the realm of action, of actual political activity. Neither working nor fabricating belong to it, for they create only what it necessary and produce what is useful in a state lacking freedom, one that derives from the dictates of human needs and desires. Here Arendt points out that life in the polis cannot fall under this kind of verdict for what is necessary and useful, because what is properly political does not necessarily emerge where human beings attempt to live together under orderly circumstances, even when it is clear that this kind of living together has to be organized, or that in living together rulership as such presents an excellent way of living. Rather, this mere organization is not yet deemed to be political, also because any despotic rulership outside the polis under these circumstances is considered to be necessary: the ruler’s life that has to be engaged with necessary things does not count among the ways of living for a free man inside the polis. The tyrannical life outside stands opposite the political form of living inside.12 The disappearance of the Greek polis and thus the ideal of contemplation thematized by Aristotle, too, and of the three free ways of living, in which inheres a political dimension, are what occupy Arendt in what follows. For what remains is only the third free way of living, the vita contemplativa— as opposed to the first two free ways of living, which have been reduced to activities that from now on are oriented toward the necessities of life. Subsequently, the medieval vita activa comprises all human activities and is understood from the perspective of absolute quiet in contemplation. In doing so, it is closer to Aristotle’s concept of unquiet—which is also an indication for a kind of being active—than it is to the third free way of living, to the more broadly formulated contemplative way of living (bios theretikos). There is a distinction between quiet, which in holding my breath brings every movement of my objective body to a standstill, and unquiet, which belongs to every activity—a distinction to which Aristotle attaches more significance than distinguishing between political and contemplative ways of living, because this distinction can again be proved in all three ways of living. Arendt highlights that Aristotle compares it with the distinction between war and peace while thinking that just as war takes place for the sake of peace, so, too, every kind of activity—even that of thinking—supposedly must take place for the sake of absolute quiet, as well as culminate in it. “Every movement, the movements of body and soul as well as of speech and reasoning, must cease before truth. Truth, be it the ancient truth of Being or the Christian truth of the living God, can reveal itself only in complete human stillness.”13

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In this way, the notion of the vita activa at the beginning of the modern era is connected to an unquiet, to a negative, which is also why an absolute primacy of contemplation nourishes the nearly unshakeable conviction that “no work of human hands can equal in beauty and truth the physical kosmos, which swings in itself in changeless eternity without any interference or assistance from outside, from man or god.”14 Only if I with all my movements and activities contain myself and quieten, can this being eternal reveal itself to me as an alterable mortal. From my position of contemplation, whoever disturbs my necessary quiet no longer plays any role in response. Everything that is movement or activity in that case becomes disturbance. In view of my position in complete stillness, all distinctions and articulations of the vita activa as such disappear. In this way—via, for example, a Greek school of thought and a Christian belief or a metaphysical philosophy—a process of hierarchization creeps in that erases articulations and distinctions of the vita activa. That is why Arendt starts over again and in her way, among other things, posits the fact of human plurality, which is the fundamental condition of every especially communal action, as well as of every act of speaking. This fact is manifested in two ways: (1) via equality it conditions every process of being understood amongst those who live in the present; conditions every process of understanding of those who are dead, in recalling the past; as well as conditions all planning for a world in the future; (2) via the difference of any person vis-à-vis another person, it conditions speech and action. To be sure, with recourse to medieval philosophies like those of Augustine, Boethius, and Plotinus, in reflecting on possible doctrines of substance, Arendt notes that this diversity is not to be equated with a kind of “particularity,” which refers to an “otherness” as a “peculiar” property of “alteritas” that appropriates all Being as such and therefore is included amongst universals.15 What is otherness in the very first place in distinction to the primal ground (Urgrund), in distinction to everything that is after it? Is what is first, in doubled negation, not not first of all something Other? In fact, otherness characterizes plurality in general and is the reason that we are only able to determine by distinguishing, the reason that each of these determinations also pronounces a negation, an Other-than (Anders-als). Similarly, “[o]therness in its most abstract form is found only in the sheer multiplication of inorganic objects, whereas all organic life already shows variations and distinctions, even between specimens of the same species,” which goes above and beyond merely being Other.16 To be capable of actively expressing distinctness, of making oneself distinct from Others, is only particular to human beings. Only human beings have the capacity for being distinguished from Others. In this way, according to Arendt, they communicate

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to their world not just something (like hunger and thirst, inclination or rejection of fear); rather, they also always communicate themselves. “In man, otherness, which he shares with everything that is, and distinctness, which he shares with everything alive, become uniqueness, and human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings.”17 The human way of being is characterized by a plural singularity, which is expressed in speaking and shown in acting, rendering distinction from one another recognizable instead of simply being different. Action and speech move in the realm between humans by way of humans. Action and speech are directed toward the people around them (Mitwelt), “and they retain their agent-revealing capacity even if their content is exclusively ‘objective,’ concerned with the matters of the world of things in which men move, which physically lies between them and out of which arise their specific, objective, worldly interests.”18 It is precisely these interests that Arendt traces back to their original literal sense, that is, to “inter-est,” that which is in-between, between us, and which produces relations that bind people with one another and simultaneously separate them from one another. “Most action and speech is concerned with this in-between.”19 What action and speech, however, concern this in-between space? In August 1953, in an intellectual journal she called her “thought diary” (published in German as the Denktagebuch), Arendt writes: “Usually we understand one another only in-between, as a result and for the sake of the world. When we understand one another directly, without relation to anything that we have in common between us, then we love.”20 In love, this relation to not being related becomes clear as a result of the fact that we as lovers are free from talking about something: in Arendt’s case, all talking with Others is always already talking about something that is common to both, which expresses the notion that we have the world in common and inhabit it communally. The exception is the talk of lovers, in which we talk with the You as we talk with ourselves, because “this You is the You of only one I, just as the Self is the Self of only one I.”21 Love as a soliloquy? In failing to recognize Others? In negating alterity? For Arendt, it is a matter of conceiving the talk of lovers to be one that is delivered from the “about,” a conversation in which we have the world in common with many, with those alien to us. The talk of lovers is poetic: they do not talk, they do not speak, they resonate. Like solitude, as it were, love moves toward the Other, going forward, as Arendt remarks in further entries in her thought diary: “Re: solitude as a political essential: in the dialogue of solitude, I realize the essential of the alter, of being Other than, of the πϱός τι, in its most common form. ‘Being Other than,’ the Otherness itself, as it is manifested in all things, indicates only plurality. The fact that I am able to realize this Otherness by being with myself is the condition for the potential of being an Other with Others. (Calling this ‘being conscious’ means in fact that its political indication is lacking; in ‘being conscious’—which

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never ever exposes and therefore never can be realized—the quality of otherness is stripped again of its relation, individualized, as it were.) The peculiar paradox consists of the fact that what is essential for the ‘unus’ can never be realized in being alone but only with Others; of the idea that I am really One, for which I need all the Others; and of the fact that the essential of the alter, in turn, is realized only in being alone, namely, ‘to be by myself.’ In this sense, solitude is the condition for the potential of community and never the other way around, and community is the condition for the potential of being One.”22 At another juncture, Arendt points out: “Just as every solitude pushes us back into being with Others (Mit-Andern)—from its being dichotomous (Zwiespältigkeit), that is, in reality being split in two (Ent-zweitheit), from which doubt (Zweifel) then arises as well—so as to become one as a result of the Other, so, too, the pure resonance of love pushes us time and again into commun-icating, in which we share in something common with the Other. The I’s You becomes the Other—the Nearest, the Neighbour, if it goes well.”23 In her move toward Others, Arendt also conceives of a vita passiva along with the vita activa, in that she apprehends desire and pain to be the senses by which we experience our own objective body (Körper) as the first external world that is able to cut us off from any world that exists outside of us. In the political philosophy of the modern era—in Thomas Hobbes, among others— Arendt sees these inner senses, in fact, subjected to a kind of mistrust. By way of these senses, mistrust nevertheless leads to humankind’s “determination” (Bestimmung), as in Hobbes’s doctrine on emotions, where desire is communicated as being the attracting motion and pain the repelling one, which together are communicated to the objective body as an animal motion as a result of the causally determined motions of the soul.24 For Arendt, however, desire and pain function in a vita passiva as sensory experiences, which allow inferences concerning the Self and Others: “Only pain removes us radically from our common world; it is the great individualizer. Even desire—although it remains an inner sense—is still bound to the Other (albeit not to the world). Like love, it is the world-less relation. Desire as a political principle is like masturbation. Pain as a political principle (particularly in Hobbes’s ‘violent death’!) is only impotence, the powerlessness of that which is—as a result of pain, or the fear of it—thrown back on itself entirely.”25 10.2 IN THE FABRIC OF HUMAN RELATIONS In our communal world, every in-between space is for every person, for every group of people, a different one, such that we “mostly talk with one another about something, communicating to one another something that is given in the world/given demonstrably, for which the fact that in such talking-about

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we involuntarily also indicate who we (the ones speaking) are, seems to be of secondary significance.”26 Here, Arendt sees the formation of an involuntary and supplementary revelation at work for the “who” of acting and speaking, which portrays an integrative component of the also purportedly objective condition of ‘being with one another’ (Miteinandersein). As such, it is “as if the objective in-between space in every ‘with one another’ (Miteinander)— including the interests inherent in that, so to speak—were overgrown and overrun by a completely different in-between, namely, by the system of relations that emerges from words and deeds themselves, from animate speech and action in which human beings directly—by way of matters that form the respective object—orient themselves towards one another and speak to one another reciprocally.”27 The complexity of the in-between. In the fabric of relationships Arendt recognizes this second in-between as one that develops in the in-between space of the world. It is an intangible in-between for it does not consist of anything thing-like (dinghaft) and thus cannot be reified, either, let alone objectified. Action and speech thus are established as processes that do not leave behind any tangible results and end products on their own. Which does not mean, though, that this second in-between is any less real in its intangibility that the world of things in our visible surroundings. Arendt calls this reality of the second in-between the “fabric of relations of human concerns” (Bezugsgewebe menschlicher Angelegenheiten), attempting with the metaphor of fabric to do justice to the physical intangibility of the phenomenon. Within this fabric of human relations the individual is revealed in action and speech, pursuing an interest or having in mind a definite goal in the world. This individual is brought to light in their personal uniqueness, thus inevitably bringing a “subjective factor” into play. Who or what, though, is the individual within such a fabric of human relations, the persona revealed in action and speech? In June 1950, Arendt notes in this regard in her “thought diary” (Denktagebuch), under the heading “Individual—I—Character”: “‘Persona’: mask, originally the role that the ego chooses for itself for the game amongst and with people; the mask it holds in front of itself to be identifiable. Individual: can also be the role or the mask we are born with, which we are lent by nature in the shape of the subjective body (Leib) and intellectual gifts and lent by society in the form of our position in it. Persona in the first sense is actually character, to the extent the persona is a product of the ego in this regard. In both cases, the question of identity arises. In the case of the character in such a way that the ego remains the sovereign master of the character, of its product, or such that it breaks through the character time and again. In the second case in such a way that the individual hides an Other, seemingly deeper individual, and the ego becomes only the formalistic principle of the unity of body (Leib) and

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soul, on the one hand, and of the unitary relatedness of multiple gifts, on the other hand. In contrast: ‘persona’ as ‘per-sonare’—sounding through.”28 The path of the individual between nature and culture branches out widely. The individual person sounds through, speaking and having their say. This one individual shows themselves, gesticulates, and acts. The general fabric of relations of human concerns always precedes every individual action and speech, since people are born by people into an already existing world of people. Arendt views the disclosure of both the new arrival through speech as well as the new beginning through action as threads that are taken into a pattern that was already woven before, thus “affecting uniquely the life stories of all those with whom [they come] into contact. It is because of this already existing web of human relationships, with its innumerable, conflicting wills and intentions, that action almost never achieves its purpose; but it is also because of this medium, in which action alone is real, that it ‘produces’ stories with or without intention as naturally as fabrication produces tangible things.”29 How are we able to find our way in this fabric? How do we speak and act, how do we tell what and why in regard of the already woven pattern? Arendt looks backward and poses the question about the past—in the first place about her own personal past in which she, as a Jew, had to flee Nazism and emigrate, after being briefly interned by the Gestapo in 1933—and then going beyond her own biography through to 1945, over the course of which she considers how precisely these years, this history, can be dealt with: in her speech titled “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts About Lessing,” given on the occasion of being awarded the Lessing Prize of the Free City of Hamburg on September 28, 1959, Arendt talks of a recently widespread inclination in Germany to act as if the years from 1933 to 1945 did not exist, “as though this part of German and European and thus world history could be expunged from the textbooks; as though everything depended on forgetting the ‘negative’ aspect of the past and reducing horror to sentimentality. (The world-wide success of The Diary of Anne Frank was clear proof that such tendencies were not confined to Germany.) It was a grotesque state of affairs when German young people were not allowed to learn the facts that every schoolchild a few miles away could not help knowing. Behind all this there was, of course, genuine perplexity.”30 From this point, Arendt further supposes that precisely the incapability of confronting what was reality after the fact could be yet a direct inheritance from inner emigration, “as it was undoubtedly to a considerable extent, and even more directly, a consequence of the Hitler regime—that is to say, a consequence of the organized guilt in which the Nazis had involved all inhabitants of the German lands, the inner exiles no less than the stalwart Party members and the vacillating fellow

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travelers. It was the fact of this guilt which the Allies simply incorporated into the fateful hypothesis of collective guilt.”31 Given this incapability, which Arendt also describes as the “awkwardness” of Germans, how are we to enter into any discussion at all about questions of the past, to find a path for dealing with the past? Arendt points to the cliché that the past is still not overcome, that one first has to go about overcoming it; that reference expresses how difficult it is to go down this path. She concludes that it is probably impossible to overcome any past and that it is certainly impossible to overcome the past of Nazism. “The best that can be achieved is to know precisely what it was, and to endure this knowledge, and then to wait and see what comes of knowing and enduring.”32 Arendt elucidated her conclusion with the aid of William Faulkner and his novel A Fable, in which Christ’s road to Calvary is told through the character of Corporal Stefan over the course of a week in France, during the First World War in 1918. “They had got used to the war now, after four years. In four years, they had even learned how to live with it, beside it; or rather, beneath it as beneath a fact or condition of nature, of physical laws—the privations and deprivations, the terror and the threat like the loom of an arrested tornado or a tidal wave beyond a single frail dyke.”33 Arendt points out that on the whole Faulkner’s novel describes very little in its 510 pages, explains even less, and, in particular, does not anything at all is “mastered”: rather, at the end of the book the tears and the “tragic effect” or even the “tragic pleasure” remain, whereby the shattering emotion makes us reconcile ourselves to the fact that something like war occurred at all. Arendt focuses therefore on tragedy because, more than any form of literature, it presents a process of recognition in the context of which the tragic hero is able to become a knowing one. Thus, they again experience what was already done in the form of suffering, and only through this pathos of what was acted do the interwoven actions become an event. In this way, the tragedy shows the turnaround from acting to suffering, against which even nontragic courses of action then become a genuine event, “only when they are experienced a second time in the form of suffering by memory operating retrospectively and perceptively. Such memory can speak only when indignation and just anger, which impel us to action, have been silenced—and that needs time.”34 We cannot overcome the past, yet we can reconcile ourselves to it. “The form for this is the lament, which arises out of all recollection.”35 Here, Arendt makes reference to Goethe: “Pain arises anew, lament repeats Life’s labyrinthine, erring course.”36

For Arendt, in such a course of life, it is precisely this tragic shattering emotion of the repetitive lament that is one of the basic elements of all action;

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it establishes its meaning and lasting significance that enters into history. To the extent that there is any “overcoming” of the past, it exists in retelling what has occurred, according to Arendt. Yet even this retelling, which constitutes history, still does not solve the problems or placate the suffering; in the end, it overcomes nothing. “Rather, as long as the meaning of the events remains alive—and this meaning can exist for very long periods of time—‘mastering of the past’ can take the form of ever-recurrent narration.”37 According to Arendt, the task of keeping this narration going and of guiding ourselves in it falls to the poets and historians, whereas we—inasmuch as we are neither poets nor historians—know very well what is happening here from, in fact, our own life experience, in which we perceive the need to call to mind that which plays a role in our lives, by telling it to ourselves and telling it out loud. “Thus we are constantly preparing the way for ‘poetry,’ in the broadest sense, as a human potentiality; we are, so to speak, constantly expecting it to erupt in some human being.”38 Only when such a breakthrough to poetry happens, does the remembering narration come to a standstill, and the preliminarily finished narrative becomes like a thing, a thing of the world amongst other such things, added to the world’s stockpile, to its fabric. “In reification by the poet or the historian, the narration of history has achieved permanence and persistence. Thus the narrative has been given its place in the world, where it will survive us. There it can live on—one story among many. There is no meaning to these stories that is entirely separable from them—and this, too, we know from our own, non-poetic experience.”39 In this regard, along with Thomas Schestag, we can ask what exactly is meant by reification (Verdinglichung), for in the process thereof “the spoken word [is] delivered of its fleeting nature; its dependency on situation and context, which is responsible for semantic satiation, is disintegrated from the individual links of a speech act, from any syntactic, metric, or narrative sequence; and every word appears before our eyes not just as a mere word, free of those surroundings, but also as alien, as a word dissolved from the binding nature of lexicon and alphabet with itself.”40 In doing so, however, there is no process of estrangement (Entfremdung) present in the move of reification, no process that “tears [language in every] semiotic detail from its inherent, natural referential correlations; rather, it is almost the reverse: remembering a kind of strangeness (Befremdlichkeit) that again becomes relevant in every linguistic application, on the way (via the school of what is commonplace) of repeatedly reaching for the word, but which ends up forgotten.”41 Arendt’s fabric of relations of human concerns is dense like poetry; her exercises in political thinking are supported not only by a theory of literature but also by a theory of language. “It is a suspension or interruption set into the middle of the process, reaching for the word in order to apprehend it: for

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in order to come to know, to recognize the word as a word, as a sign with meaning or a complex of signs that bear meaning, it has to be signified into the sign with meaning.”42 Schestag analyzes Arendt’s semiotics verbatim and points out that in this process of pointing to a word as a sign with meaning “the signifying and the signified orientation reach into each other and suspend each other for the fraction of an instant: that is the instant in which the word neither signifies nor can be signified into the word but, rather, falls out of both interpretive approaches, interrupting both of them. Precisely this instant (the one alien to language) is encapsulated into every process of verbal recognition.”43 It is precisely this instant that literature enlarges, and this enlargement denominates the process of reification, in which neither between word nor thing can be decided in the word. Still, according to Schestag, the reification process releasing the breakthrough of literature also contains the notion “that literature ultimately does not solidify into the semiotic carrier of semantic content, that it blocks the intention of seeing literature detached through an interpretation or collection of interpretations.”44 The past that is still not overcome corresponds to a literature that cannot be overcome. 10.3 FRIENDSHIP The process of reifying the word, which has triggered the incalculable breakthrough of poetry, corresponds in the political sphere to public discussion between people. Arendt calls this process “objectification” (Vergegenständlichung), which she accredits to conversation in the last part of her Lessing speech. She places the process in the agora of the polis, which is why it cannot be any conversation of intimacy, one in which friends talk about themselves. From the perspective of the conversational situation in the marketplace, Arendt is interested in friendship also as a praxis of freedom, the proper essence of which the Greeks saw there in discourse, where subsequently the political significance of friendship is manifested, as well as the humanness that is peculiar to friendship. For precisely this discussion, “permeated though it may be by pleasure in the friend’s presence, is concerned with the common world, which remains ‘inhuman’ in a very literal sense unless it is constantly talked about by human beings. For the world is not humane just because it is made by human beings, and it does not become humane just because the human voice sounds in it, but only when it has become the object of discourse.”45 Precisely this objectification opens up a space that is found, of course, in the public sphere and therefore also has its limits, yet it nevertheless also opens up a space that is accessible and without concepts, in which a consensus can be formed about the object in question,

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but in which conflict can also multiply points of view, among which a random word enters into the conversation as the object of that discourse and remains there, and, in line with Schestag, not least of all “also draws the discourse into the conversation, so as to subject it (for example) to the question: What is a discussion?”46 Only by talking about it do we humanize what occurs in the world, as well as what occurs in our own interior, and it is in this talking that we learn to be human. In this way, Arendt refers to the love toward human beings that is shown in Greek thinking on philanthropia in the fact that in discussions of friendship we are willing to share the world with Others. The common welfare is constituted as part of the equalization (isasthenai) in friendship, which does not mean that friends become the same as each other but, rather, that they are partners of equal value in a world held in common, that together they form a community. Community is brought forth by friendship. It is the bond that unites and comes above justice, because between friends no justice is needed.47 “More than his friend as a person, one friend understands how and in what specific articulateness the common world appears to the other, who as a person is forever unequal or different. This kind of understanding— seeing the world (as we rather tritely say today) from the other fellow’s point of view—is the political kind of insight par excellence.”48 Thinking of a vita communis. Laying the groundwork for an ethics of friendship that, to be sure, acknowledges the Otherness of the Other, though it is formed by what is held in common, not by what separates. In the case of Arendt, friendship makes political claims and is related to the world, albeit not just for Ancient Greece but also in the Roman notion of humanitas. In Rome, to be sure, friendship undergoes some alterations, that is, the discussions of people from different origins with the citizens of Rome about the world and about life became a guarantee for these persons of citizenship. In this respect, according to Arendt, it is distinct from the modern concept of humanity, when it is seen as the mere phenomenon of education. Further intensifying her concerns in her address, Arendt selects an example from what is for her a classic drama of friendship, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan the Wise from 1779, which plays at the time of an armistice during the Third Crusade between 1189 and 1192, bringing the Jew Nathan together with a Christian Templar knight, who has saved Nathan’s daughter Recha from a burning building. The Templar, in turn, owes his life to the sultan Saladin, the Moslem ruler of Jerusalem, as a result of the fact that the knight resembles Saladin’s brother Assad and was thus the only one pardoned out of twenty prisoners. In a scene addressed by Arendt in her speech, Nathan meets the Templar and enters with him into one of the play’s many discussions about the three major monotheistic religions:

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Templar: Well said indeed!—But do you know the folk / That was the first to carp at other tribes? / Was first to call itself the chosen people? / Suppose that I did not exactly hate / But for its pride was forced to scorn that folk: / The pride it then passed on to Christians, Moslem, / Which says their god alone is the true god! / You’re startled at this from a Christian Templar? / But when and where has pious frenzy, claiming / The better god, intent on forcing him / Upon the world at large, revealed itself / In blacker form than here, and now? O he / Whose eyes drop not their present scales. . . . And yet / Be blind who will!— Forget what I have said; / And leave me! (Starts to go.) Nathan: Ha! You know not how much closer / I now shall cling to you.—O come, we must, / We must be friends!—Disdain my folk, as much / As ever you will. For neither one has chosen / His folk. Are we our folk? What is a folk? / Are Jew and Christian sooner Jew and Christian / Than man? How good, if I have found in you / One more who is content to bear the name / Of man! Templar: By Heaven, yes! you have indeed! / You have in truth!—Your hand—I am ashamed, / To have misjudged you for a moment’s time. Nathan: And I am proud of it. It’s only baseness / That rarely is misjudged. Templar: And what is rare / We hardly can forget.—Yes, Nathan, yes: / We must, we must become good friends.49

Friendship is vehemently insisted upon, here between Nathan and the Templar and in further scenes during conversations with others. Over the course of those discussions, this tension between the truth of God and the imperative of friendship is revealed every time. A few scenes prior, a categorical sort of discourse precedes this imperative discourse, which in turn originates with Nathan, here conversing with the dervish: Dervish: Now by the prophet! / That I’m no real one, that may well be true. / Yet if one must— Nathan: Must! Dervish!—Dervish must? / No man needs must, and must a dervish, then? / What must he?50

Arendt discusses both ways of speaking by comparing Lessing’s imperative discourse with Kant’s categorical discourse: “So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in a giving of universal law.”51 Facticity of reason? Arendt elaborates how in Kant’s ethics the categorical imperative is posited absolutely and thus “introduces into the interhuman realm—which by its nature consists of relationships—something that runs counter to its fundamental relativity. The inhumanity which is bound up with the concept of one single truth emerges with particular clarity in Kant’s work precisely because he attempted to found truth on practical reason; it

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is as though he who had so inexorably pointed out man’s cognitive limits could not bear to think that in action, too, man cannot behave like a god.”52 According to Lessing, though, she points out that the truth, as soon as it is uttered, is transformed immediately into an opinion among opinions; it is contested and reformulated and thus, like others, becomes the object of discourse. Schestag calls this critique of Kant by Arendt into question, since her classification of the categorical imperative bears categorical traits itself, as soon as she directs her focus toward the fact that the categorical imperative is absolutely posited: “The categorical imperative is not—neither categorically nor imperatively—the must that marks it; it is neither absolutely posited nor given; rather, it plays a peculiar doubling in the self-understanding—in the groundwork, as it were—of the categorical must: the must is not, not presupposed, but needs must instead. This necessary though impossible doubling in the groundwork of the categorical demand displaces the categorical imperative, as well as displaces the categorical reply [of Arendt] that it is supposedly posited absolutely, in its origin.”53 In this way, as well as in calling Arendt into question, the reification of language is again a topic for discussion, namely, in the impossible doubling mentioned as a “suspending and silencing of the performative trait in the framework of acting linguistically”: No man needs (literally, must) must—We must, we must be friends.54 For Schestag, the repetition of the act “must” in both sentences gives occasion to ask: “Must it be that? Isn’t one ‘must’ in both sentences unnecessary, superfluous, misplaced? Yet which ‘must’ is the one that must be, even idly so?”55 Schestag’s second question refers to the notion that the act “must”—because it just needs must—will never become detached by the act “must” itself but that it plays in idle moments (in Muße) instead, “into unsuppressable loosening and distancing from the categorical, action-oriented trait, as well as into access that attempts to show, to establish, and to overcome the act ‘must’ as must.”56 By way of Arendt, then, we end up on the brink of the formulation of every word, in a complex play on the word in one or the other language, in which particularly literature as a linguistic interruption or caesura comes our way, “described and thought of as an irruption of the semblance of belonging to language, in which it breaks through.”57 What remains? As Arendt contemplates in her conversation with Günter Gaus, it is the mother tongue, for which for her there is no replacement. “I write in English, but I have never lost a feeling of distance from it. There is a tremendous difference between your mother tongue and another language. For myself I can put it extremely simply: In German I know a rather large part of German poetry by heart; the poems are always somehow in the back of my mind. I can never do that again. I do things in German that I would not permit myself to do in English.”58 Arendt describes how her mother tongue, for which there is no replacement for her, is shot through with poems that are not

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fixed but, rather, in some way move around in the back of her mind; poems that cannot be established while on the move, which she knows by heart in German, neither just internally nor externally, neither inside nor outside the German language but, rather by heart in her; poems that—as Schestag makes clear—in Martin Luther’s German “break the mother and explode the limits of the mother tongue; poems that confirm the ruin of believing in the phenomenon of one or the other mother, the one or the other language, in their limits.”59 The poems that are not simply present in the language that they negotiate and open up but, rather, poems that are responsible for the fact that Arendt allows herself things and reifications that she would not allow herself in English: “irregularities, lack of rules, exceptions, pauses. Things that simply do not occur in German, are simply not German things but, rather, collapse the semblance of unity and cohesion of German.”60 According to that position, what else remains? In line with Derrida, does the “mother” tongue continue to be the language of Others in the experience of expropriation or, formulated more broadly, of “exappropriation”? What remains, Schestag asks in contrast, “of the poems that are on the move in me and that break through, to me, as they do to language—to the mother—poems that cannot become law, or be replaced or given, and poems that I refuse to lose?“61 What remains, Schestag further asks, “not unconditionally as the property and remnant of language for which there is no replacement, and for which there is perhaps just for that reason no replacement because it is not any postulate or any law, and because there aren’t any; what remains does not remain either for the mother or for the language; what remains—in every poem, with every word that breaks through—is neither a poem nor a word but remains instead unovercome (unbewältigt) for language, one interruption (more). In an other word, and other than with words, in every word, a beginning.”62 Laying the groundwork for an ethics of unovercome language, as a consequence of which I am only therefore able to speak to myself (that is: to think), because I am able to speak with Others. It is not the relationship I have to me, to my Self, but instead the relationship to the Other that is the criterion for all disposition.

Chapter 11

Ethics of Ethics

In 1965, the Austrian philosopher and pedagogue Franz Fischer published his Philosophische Übungen zur Eingewöhnung der von sich reinen Gesellschaft (Philosophical Practices for Habitualizing the Inherently Pure Society). Given the main title Proflexion und Reflexion (Proflection and Reflection), the work ostensibly presents a logical attempt to delve into what is human, namely, in the direction of “experience that is inherently pure and fulfilled.”1 What does that mean? 11.1 PROFLECTION, REFLECTION, AND ATENSION Central to Fischer’s philosophical practices are logical observations on interpersonal encounters, made recognizable in two ways as borderline cases of human beings’ experience out of what is human: they are (1) the turn of one person toward the other person, and (2) the turn back of the one person toward themselves. Whereas in the first case (in proflection) the I moves itself away from itself, going toward the You, in the second case (in reflection) it goes in the opposite direction back toward itself again. In Fischer’s logical observation, both options reciprocally rule each other out; they stand virtually opposite each other in a contrary movement, occlude each other, and therefore cannot know anything about each other. This first practice, however, is not for pursuing the turns in the linear course from toward the You and back toward the I. Rather, as Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik makes clear in his foreword to Fischer’s Philosophische Übungen (Philosophical Practices), it is “for the encounters of the person with the person which result from both. It is not what can be experienced proreflexively and reflexively which is logically through-composed but, rather, what grows out of the proreflexive and reflexive encounter for the human being’s being human: in the contrapositive encounter, the I turns away from itself and towards the one who turns away from itself and towards that ‘I.’ In the contranegative encounter, the I turns 179

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towards itself and away from the one who turns towards and away from that ‘I.’”2 To this end, Fischer’s work borrows from Descartes’ meditations (his First Philosophy), the philosophy of dialogue from Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig (regarding the fundamental reverse experience out of the You), Husserl’s phenomenology (regarding the fundamental experience of the I), and Levinas’s thinking on alterity (the claim of Others). Yet Fischer’s logical attempt is characterized above all by the likewise logical undertaking in Hegel, on the one hand, and in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Kierkegaard, on the other. In Hegel, as Schmied-Kowarzik puts forward, “reflection on self-determination of the absolute spirit has heightened in the conceivable enactment of its configurations and has thus become negatively occluded within itself vis-à-vis reality and the ‘unimaginable existence’ thereof”; to this reflection, through which “human beings completely lose [their] creative force.” In contrast, Schelling opposes the principle of “ecstasy,” for instance, seeing it as “the Self moving outside itself, the complete giving up of wanting to know itself, so as to open up for what is real (das Wirkliche) in its realization (Wirken).”3 My giving to something Other is an initial act of disclosing, of unclosing, of opening. Fischer proceeds in this sense, too, by unfolding a kind of logic that develops a polarity between both potentials for personal encounter. Here it is also a matter of opposing a “pure” society to one that is “fulfilled.” In this regard, Fischer writes: “Where we, in a borderline case, become aware of ourselves only in one direction in the ‘You’; it is there that we familiarize ourselves from ourselves in the Alien. However, where we, in another borderline case, become aware of ourselves only from the other direction in the ‘I’; it is there that we familiarize ourselves from the Alien in us, and the inherently fulfilled society holds us in thrall.”4 How can a society be inherently “pure” or “fulfilled”? In the first case, proflection, I turn toward an Other. What I immutably experience is the pure experience by me of what is human (or else the experience of it where I disregard me), which can be extended to the pure experience of what is human in a pure society (or else the experience of it where everyone disregards their respective I), whereby we become familiar in us through us with us. In the second case, reflection, I go back toward myself. I remain with myself and am only aware of me, which can be extended to the inherently fulfilled self-contemplation (only satisfying itself and being occupied with itself) of each individual in the subsequently inherently fulfilled society, which holds everyone respectively in only their own thrall, being occupied respectively with themselves, without turning respectively toward the Others. Since both borderline cases, proflection and reflection, only run parallel in this logic of experiencing what is human and therefore render impossible any

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overlapping or intertwining, and because they are in permanent, unresolvable tension, the question arises as to how they make possible any experience of the logic of what is human and minimize, much less resolve, this tension, or—put another way—how they can at all be repositioned into the world and reach us. Fischer therefore incorporates an additive into his logic, atension, which is not repositioned by him into any unresolvable tension but from which instead radiates a quiet expectation or else a form of attentive contemplation, as part of which we are also able to observe ourselves. For it is only via ourselves that the claim and the concern of this logic can be realized: the “atensional calculus” that Fischer designates in this sense intends exactly to move from a logic of experience to an experience of logic, in which an opening to Others resonates, an opening also to us as readers. An additional facet of this calculus to consider in this case is which of the two mutually exclusive potentials we could select (where applicable): do we decide (1) for the turn toward You and thus for proflection, or do we decide (2) for turning back toward the I and thus for reflection? However we would choose, the realization of both would have consequences for the history of salvation, in accordance with the Fischer’s Christian understanding as well. For while the reflexive turning back toward ourselves, apprehended by all of us as absolute, leaves to us, “self-obsessively (selbstbesessen), the nonviolent power of war in inherently fulfilled freedom,” the proflexive turning leads us, “self-dispossessedly (selbstentgeben) to the nonviolent power of peace in inherently pure freedom.”5 In Fischer, this turn is coupled with his belief in a salvation that for him presents a “Nazarene realization of humanity” (nazarenische Ermenschlichung) from the one who is nearest, from one’s neighbor, which will happen through Jesus of Nazareth.6 Subsequent to his foreword, and in view of this prophetic message, Fischer sets up his merely ostensibly logical attempt with the help of almost meditative verses, which offer multiple potentials for encounter—like, for example, encounters in time—in these verses captioned with Die Stunde (The Hour), excerpted here: 1 We stretch out of ourselves into the across which stretches out of itself across into ourselves. We stretch into ourselves out of the across which stretches into itself across out of ourselves. 2 We move along out of our ending in the beginning away from the one

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who moves along out of their ending in our beginning. We move along in our beginning out of the end away from the one who moves along in their beginning out of our ending. 3 We pass on out of our consequence into ourselves and come about out of ourselves in the basis of the one who out of their consequence passes on into themselves and comes about out of themselves in our basis. We come about in our basis out of ourselves and pass on into ourselves out of the consequence of the one who in their basis comes about out of themselves and passes on into themselves out of our consequence. 4 We are in looking back at ourselves after ourselves and ahead of ourselves in looking ahead at the one who is in looking back at themselves after themselves and ahead of themselves in looking ahead at ourselves. We are in looking ahead at ourselves ahead of ourselves and after ourselves in looking back at the one who is in looking ahead at themselves ahead of themselves and after themselves in looking back at ourselves.7

Fischer calls on his readers to remain quiet, though for a good reason, because he likewise calls on them to engage with his texts, to practice with them in order, through them, to become habitualized in the inherently pure society. Time and again, that is why he alternates between proflection and reflection, formulates what is formulaic, issues shibboleths, and—in our precise, pausing reading, in contemplative reading and thinking along with him—attains a pause, as a result of which we grasp little by little that for him it is about this alternating, this to and fro between I and You, to me and You. “All actual life is encounter,” as Martin Buber develops by way of the basic word “I-You”: “I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You.”8 Fischer puts comparable, reciprocal sensory movements to paper, which results in potential for encounter in the experience of what is human between us, as in Die Stunde (The Hour) in time, in the before and the after, in looking ahead and looking back, in foresight and hindsight, at the beginning and at the end, in birth and at death. He gives this potential for encounter an additional point of reference, too, a concrete meeting place, as in Der Ort (The Place): 1 We are out of ourselves

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there in the one who is out of themselves there in ourselves. We are in ourselves there out of the one which is in themselves there out of ourselves. 2 We set ourselves down out of our body into ourselves and set ourselves free out of ourselves in the form of the one, who sets themselves down out of their body into themselves and sets themselves free in our form out of themselves. We set ourselves free in our form out of ourselves and set ourselves down into ourselves out of the body of the one who sets themselves free in their form out of themselves and sets themselves down out of our body into themselves. 3 We concoct ourselves out of our position in ourselves with ourselves and construct ourselves out of ourselves without ourselves in the place of the one who concocts themselves out of their position in themselves with themselves, and constructs themselves out of themselves without themselves in our place. We construct ourselves in our place out of ourselves without ourselves and concoct ourselves in ourselves with ourselves out of the position of the one who constructs themselves in their place out of themselves without themselves and concocts themselves in themselves with themselves out of our place. 4 We are out of ourselves ourselves full-mirrored “here in the hollow” and empty-mirrored “there on the peak” in the one who is out of themselves full-mirrored “here in the hollow” and empty-mirrored “there on the peak” in ourselves. Wir are in ourselves empty-mirrored “there on the peak” and full-mirrored “here in the hollow” out of the one who is in themselves empty-mirrored “there on the peak” and full-mirrored “here in the hollow” out of ourselves.9

Fischer writes about our encounter with each of our own objective bodies (Körper) and about the encounter of each of our bodies with the figure of Others, as they appear to us. Doing so, the body belongs to the borderline case

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of proflection, the figure to the borderline case of reflection. There are no lines that pass between them. It is again this alternating that in its enactment makes possible a logic of what is human, which from one perspective or the other always ends up in thinking via us. Something comparable happens as well in Die Umwälzung (Overturning): 1 We are like the Other of ourselves the One of him who like the Other of himself is the One of ourselves. We are like the One of ourselves the Other of him who like the One of himself is the Other of ourselves.10

Fischer describes how we, as Others, can be Others, while in the same way Others come counter to us, encounter us, as Others. He attempts to give to something Other, an initial act of disclosing, of unclosing, of opening. I think, because you are. 11.2 ALTERITARY PRAXIS To be sure, I do begin, though not with me but some other place. I enter into that which is my point of departure. This referential turn begins where I cannot be; it is completed outside my corporeal (leiblich) Self. My being-for-me is also a being-for-Others, for I see but am also seen. Laying the groundwork for my corporeality (Leiblichkeit) and the corporeality of Others. Seeing means capable of being-seen, touching means capable of being-touched, affecting means capable of being-affected, as well as capable of being-hurt. In these ways, the reference is also turned chiastically toward Others; it is always there and possible, even if it did not absolutely have to come to the fore in any specific situation: the claim of alterity as well as making claims via alterity. In the ethos we are disposed by way of these references in relations of alterity from out of the response, occupying a position. Each of our happenings is one of the responsive in-between and does not take place on a plane that is, for example, superordinate to us, already decided, and already normalized; it occurs, rather, on a plane that is intercorporeal (zwischenleiblich) and, in this imperative sense, prereflexive, prefinal, and prenormative, by way of immutable experiences, in the pathos of encounters, in aisthetic and ethical dimensions of the performative, in word and deed, in being silent

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and nondoing, in admitting and averting. Put another way, this antecedent relating means that each and every understanding between us, grounded in possibly common objectives and perhaps general regulations, is not presupposed but is, rather, conceived in the act of arising. What preempts everything is not the maxims of a thought process, the virtue or norm of a disposition— which can be judged and planned and belong to what has already been said and done—but the claims that are demanded of us at any time. The responsive ethics thus understood from the perspective of our answer anticipates an ethics that is gradually differentiated by the ways of disposition on a social field. It is an ethics of ethics and, as a responsive ethics, presides over the realm of normative claims of validity and rules, which can also be described with the concept of morality. We can therefore ask: Where does the binding nature of an act according to a maxim come from? Seen this way, is morality only provisional because it has not yet found its groundwork? In this moral situation, do we thus not also abide in a kind of uncertainty, because we cannot be certain for ourselves of the rule to be put into practice or the case to be interpreted?11 Does morality not always already come too late, because what happens in between in responding has already preceded it? At this pathic juncture of every encounter, do we not run into the “blind spot” of morality, as Waldenfels postulates it?12 Thinking of a responsive ethics attempts to delve into the rise of an ethics of ethics, differentiated little by little by way of behaviors, so as to open up a space in which questions, motivations, and inspirations become visible in alteritary relations and possible in freedoms. This ethics of alterity—which is developed through an aisthetics of existence as a doctrine of perception for a carnal ethos—therefore entails an intercorporeal disposition that is not led by rules or goals but is about acts of founding (Stiftungen) as events, in which the Others and I myself are, of course, nevertheless participants, albeit not as all-dominant subjects, actors, or authors. It is precisely the acknowledgement of these dispositions that takes shape in an alteritary praxis, as part of which it becomes clear that my corporeal thinking comes from Others; that my disposition is involved with Others; that my position is opened vis-à-vis Others; and that my disposition even vis-à-vis myself is claimed by Otherness.13 “In the end, what we immutably experience is subject to a kind of unavoidability that cannot be understood by the opposites of freedom and necessity. It is never completely in my hands whether something catches my eye or crosses my mind, pleases or displeases me, whether a gaze or a word strikes me. I can not not answer when I am struck by something, and yet I am still the one who gets involved in it or refuses to do so.”14 Here, Waldenfels makes clear that this inevitability of the immutable experience does not coincide with any external compulsion limiting or even abrogating my freedom. Rather, it becomes clear that part of this pathos entails a practical necessity, namely, an

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internal having to (müssen) that is inscribed in my being able to (können) as a not being otherwise able to (nicht-anders-können). “There is no ought (sollen) that dictates ought, just as there is no will (Willen) that in turn is able to want or not want volition (wollen) itself.”15 With this line of thinking, Waldenfels speaks to Kant as well, calling him into question in that he purports that every ought has its source in an act of speaking to, just as every volition derives from an act of entering willingly, as it were, from consenting (Ein-willigung). “What happens to me nolens volens (willy-nilly), is not an act; it becomes an act that I enact, or becomes an action that I execute, by responding to what happens this way or that. In this way, the whom of pathos is transformed into the who of a response.”16 Seeing itself entangled in this experience, my Self is not a subject, not a central authority but has instead more of a patient’s or respondent’s doubleness of form, without the one figure ever falling into line with the other. Our Self is, namely, entangled in that which happens between us, in a dimension that can be characterized as dialogic or intersubjective. Our Self moves in an in-between realm where we are accustomed to ordering by dividing up roles, rights, and duties as individuals. “Coordinating authorities like the law see to it that one freedom is able to exist with others. This pluralization of freedom presupposes a double bookkeeping that allows keeping what is properly ours separate from what is alien.”17 Waldenfels confers with Kant: “Sapere aude! Have courage to make use of your own understanding!”18 or “act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature.”19 In connection to these citations, of course, we need to take the address to or the call on us inherent in these two imperatives at their word. For in their separation of what is properly ours from what is alien, they run up against their limits. The dictate “Thou shalt!” in these imperatives runs the risk, namely, of being treated as a mere figure of speech, behind which inheres nothing more than a general law in the manner of: “Every rational being ought to . . . ” Intersubjectivity—which is, according to Waldenfels, nevertheless indicated in Kant—thus becomes a sort of “transsubjectivity” that is elevated above all the in-between spheres we can only think of. Any revision of the above only becomes possible when we take events (Ereignisse) as our point of departure and apprehend these as in-between events (Zwischenereignisse). In order to reach this point, Waldenfels cites Kleist, who combines his idea about the “gradual production of thoughts whilst speaking” with that of a corresponding production in interlocution: “often a look announcing that a half-expressed thought is already grasped gives us its other half’s expression.”20 According to Waldenfels, this “giving” can be understood in a two-fold manner: as a kind of sparing, saving and as a kind of endowing, granting. Waldenfels asks, “Is the thought given in this

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way, issuing from an open connection and not resulting from any regulated linkage, my own or one alien to me? Am I entirely free to return a greeting, to agree to a request, to accept a gift, to react to an insult or an act of violence?,” so as to characterize the unavoidability of those immutable events coming from Others: they affect not just me but turn also toward me, and with a certain degree of latitude I can choose how or what I respond but not whether I want to respond.21 “There is a Yes compelled from me which every response contains. Classical motivations like afflatus, inspiration, or pardon, which are frequently shunted off into another, higher world, are a priori at work in our words and deeds; they are not external additives that merely crown the work of freedom. What we have to answer as alien, whether we want to or not, confronts us with a lived impossibility, for these kinds of alien demands— and not even just the categorical imperative—explode the framework of pre-existing possibilities.”22 Conceived in this way, I do not ask what makes my amazement, my desire, or my pain possible, because what I experience as immutable preempts the possibility. Thus in our present there opens up “a split that can be specified into one, both as the precedence of the immutable event and as the subsequence of a response.”23 At this juncture in thinking about time, Waldenfels purports a future in which we precede ourselves: “Responding does not mean that something preceded as a cause in time; answering means that the one answering precedes themselves by coming from Others.”24 Precisely this change in perspective makes freedom responsive, for in this way it starts with what we experience immutably and not with what we posit and presuppose. Here, in pondering time, Waldenfels has recourse, too, to Henri Bergson, who in his reflections on The Two Sources of Morality and Religion is thinking about an imminent war: “But when, on August 4, 1914, I opened the Matin newspaper and read in great headlines: ‘Germany Declares War on France,’ I suddenly felt an invisible presence which all the past had prepared and foretold, as a shadow may precede the body that casts it.”25 According to Waldenfels, in Bergson every traumatization and every catastrophe, every discovery and every founding comes too early, sooner than we could attribute it to our freedom. “Too soon” means in this respect more than “sooner.” for it does not lie “on any timeline where every temporal event, related to other events, appears sooner or later. ‘Too soon’ relates to expectations and designs that are crossed out and rendered futile by a move in the opposite direction.”26 Bergson therefore finds the imminent war to be probable and impossible at the same time. “The effect suffered, which announces itself in a kind of ‘vague disquiet,’ without being able to anticipate it concretely, precedes its possibility, different to an embryonically designed potential, which is gradually realized.”27 This holds true, too, for Others’ time, which creates a different time, because Others do not gradually become manifest for me; they claim me instead immediately

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in their effect suffered by me. “[W]hat could you reply to the man,” as the appropriate question raised by Bergson goes, “who declared that he places his own interest before all other considerations?”28 Bergson explains that, looking more closely, this morality has never sufficed on its own but merely as an artful supplement added to obligations that already existed before, making them possible in the first place. “When Greek philosophers attributed a preeminent dignity to the pure idea of Good, and, more generally, to a life of contemplation, they were speaking for a chosen few, a small group formed within society, which would begin by taking social life for granted.”29 Bergson further argues that it was said that this morality did not speak of duty, for it supposedly did not know obligation in the sense of Bergson’s present day, which is quite correct, as Bergson confirms, though only because it observed it as being self-evident. “The philosopher was supposed to have begun by doing his duty like anybody else, as demanded of him by the city. Only then did a morality supervene, destined to make his life more beautiful by treating it as a work of art. In a word, and to sum up the discussion, there can be no question of founding morality on the cult of reason.”30 Rather, ethics has to be grounded in the life of everyone, not just in the life only of a privileged group, of a philosophical elite, and also not just in anything posited rationally. In this context, Bergson distinguishes between (1) a closed morality that in freedom determines our self-preserving disposition in everyday life, in which nevertheless norms of course apply and are observed, as under a law of nature that guarantees stability and security by putting an individual under pressure; and (2) an open morality, grounded in humaneness, freedom, and love which makes changes possible through freely unfolding. Closed morality corresponds to a static religion that is reinforced by rituals and myths, in that it offers its adherents a foothold, working against any disintegration with the aid of tabus, and also in that it puts the notion of immortality into the world. In contrast, open morality corresponds to a dynamic religion, in which its adherents free themselves from all worldly bonds in a self-determined manner, and where, in a virtually mystical way, they are able to supersede the limits of their social community. As part of the thus preferred creative development, Bergson is opposed to any easily satisfied rational thinking that reason posits de facto. Reason cannot satisfy itself, for behind it prevail forces like egoism and passion, which it is unable to silence. Bergson is thus also opposed to any self-evident social thinking that reason likewise posits de facto, whereby it necessarily exerts pressure on the members of society, a constraint that is obligation. “But in the first place, for society to exist at all the individual must bring into it a whole group of inborn tendencies; society therefore is not self-explanatory; so we must search below the social accretions, get down to Life, of which human societies, as indeed the human species altogether, are but manifestations.”31 In

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other words: societies are not declared on their own but arise, rather, behind (a posteriori to) manifestations of life. Bergson is thus aiming at an openness in the rise of societies, which he relocates in life, from the perspective of which everything is a manifestation, led by the creative force or even impetus for life (un élan vital), which constitutes the basis of his ethics of ethics. “The finished portrait is explained by the features of the model, by the nature of the artist, by the colours spread out on the palette; but, even with the knowledge of what explains it, no one, not even the artist, could have foreseen exactly what the portrait would be, for to predict it would have been to produce it before it was produced—an absurd hypothesis which is its own refutation.”32 Bergson compares this situation of the artist and their model with our life’s moments, in which the relationship is not otherwise, for we are their author. Every moment is a kind of creation. “And just as the talent of the painter is formed or deformed—in any case, is modified—under the very influence of the works he produces, so each of our states, at the moment of its issue, modifies our personality, being indeed the new form that we are just assuming.”33 Our deeds depend on what we are, and Bergson insists on adding that to a certain degree we are also what we do, that we are creating ourselves incessantly. 11.3 CREATIVE THINKING In this way, we are moving onto a social field, on which an alteritary praxis also makes visible claims that are constantly raised from this field—like, for example, claims to a certain kind of acknowledgement, to security and care, to specific rights and goods. From this perspective, Michel Vanni moves onto this field and sees as addressees of such claims a multitude of institutions that come to a head in their entanglement in the modern state with its judicial and legal apparatus. Vanni, however, moves onto this field in order to elaborate how all responsibility is shaped there, how any specific institution—the state, in particular—responds and is able to respond to these claims. In principle, he thus poses questions as to how we are able to respond to a claim; how we simply perceive it and are then able to attempt to adapt our response to its content; and whether it is always entirely clear who is raising such a claim; and whether it is always entirely clear if we, and no Others, are personally called upon and have to respond to the claim.34 Vanni points out that, given these questions, it is indeed possible to view the social field as one that consists of already given groups and entities, which with their positions may simply lie before our distanced gaze. As such, they would make it possible to divide the social field up into various individual pieces that, for instance,

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each correspond to a specific activity or group or interest. “Each ought to have their place in the game of social relationships; and should uncertainties in determining these places still exist or conflicts arise for these places, then we only need a theoretical view from above in order to define them better and more precisely. Every social actor who means to advance their own identity, their group affiliation, or their needs somehow has to take in this total view, so as to observe themselves amidst the entire social field from above, so to speak. Seen in this way, the modern state constitutes in a certain sense only the institutional realization of this view, and then even its compulsory power will always follow a previous theoretical judgment.”35 Would this distanced view onto the social field be the gaze that Foucault takes? Does Foucault gaze from outside onto that which he designates as “dispositif”? What is a dispositif? Under this concept, Foucault consolidates a heterogeneous ensemble, comprising “discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid.”36 Whereas these elements constitute the dispositif, the dispositif itself is the network that can be linked between these elements. In Foucault, one frequently discussed element in this network is discourse, which he also presents as discursive practice, which does not describe an action but a form of action instead, which in turn is characterized by a totality of rules.37 We thus move onto a general domain of all statements in which we are able to establish a group of statements that can be individualized, and where there is a regulated practice responsible for a specific number of statements.38 Here, Waldenfels points out that Foucault is involved in an obvious attempt at putting regulatory realms, authorities, measures, and applications into a context that avoids conventional pre- and postordination, super- and subordination.39 That is what the corresponding definition of discursive moments shows, which Foucault calls “statements” (les énoncés), as they are commonly translated, too. In this case, Waldenfels would prefer if we would speak more appropriately of “the (contents of the) pronouncement,” so as “to keep at a distance every echo of the special form of predication.”40 In Foucault, the statement is distinguished “from logical propositions, grammatical sentences, standardized forms of speech, and distinctive signs; it thus eludes customary disjunctions. It falls neither on the side of general structures, rules, or codes and ideal forms, nor on the side of empirical facts, isolated cases, unique occurrences, and real embodiments,” as Waldenfels elaborates.41 A discourse that is, say, clinical or economic is understood by Foucault in this sense as a totality of statements that belong to a formational system. “Accordingly, statements are not final, irreducible elements or atoms of discourse; rather, they take over a specific function of existence responsible

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for the appearance of specific signs and for the actualization of specific rules and continuous forms. We can say that the lawfulness (Gesetzmäßigkeit) of discursive practice is embodied in associated statements, in which the latter for their part determine what can be pronounced with the help of distinctive signs, respectively, in well-formed propositions, understandable sentences, and successful speech acts.” 42 Yet how can a discursive practice, a form of action, determined by a totality of rules, account for its application and its formation? In this set of rules, is it at all possible for there to be a discursive practice that is productive? No. Except at the price of an infinite regress, of a never-ending move backward from the effect to the cause, there cannot be this productivity—as Waldenfels concludes—any more than there can be action and speech that follow specific rules, that can create order. A vacuum remains that cannot be filled with mere strategies, either. For Waldenfels, out of this dilemma follows “one that affirmatively speaks (ein Zu-Sagendes) and affirmatively activates (Zu-Tätigendes) in the sense of transdiscursive claims that appear a fronte, and which prevent discursive events of speaking and acting from being mere events in a regulated discourse. Should this extraordinary status belong to the orders of discourse themselves, then it may not simply break in externally; it would have allied with a pre-discursive domain of that which affirmatively orders things (das Zu-Ordnende), with a ‘crude being of language’ (être brut de l’ordre) that Foucault speaks of at a previous juncture.”43 Thus, only what is not entirely in the orders of discourse (Ordnungen der Diskurse) is able to be accessed by way of them. At this juncture, Waldenfels introduces that which occupies him in particular: the order that is differentiated as an ordered structure, set, happening, and domain, thus laying open contexts that rather diverge in concepts like system, law, or rule.44 “I speak deliberately of an order in discourses in order to indicate that discourses are not merely subject to specific ordering but, rather, that orders are developed and embodied in discourses. The genitive case in the formulation ‘Ordnung des Diskurses’ is not just a possessive genitive case but, rather, an explicative one”45—more “order for the discourse” than “order of the discourse.” In this way, Waldenfels refers back to a phenomenology of corporeality in which, as a consequence, the subjective body (Leib), even the linguistic living body (Sprachleib), is not a mere vehicle but, rather, simultaneously an “anchorage,” “laboratory,” “arena,” “impetus,” and “shackles.”46 What ensues is a change of view that directs the view not externally but internally, from inside the happening, into the social field, during the course of which every practical action is a response. In discussing Waldenfels, Vanni accordingly responds: “Because the claim that motivates the responses can never entirely be referred back to an already existing order, and because the responses can never entirely correspond to their claim, all sensory ordering

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of the event of responding is in part disrupted, and this event is in part decontextualized.”47 Vanni clarifies how in the process neither the interruption nor the decontextualization are absolute, because they would otherwise end up in the void of senselessness. Instead, what holds true is that it is always a specific order or a specific field that is disrupted, but which still exists in this interruption. “The deviation or shift of the order happens in this ordering itself, not outside it. In this respect, all networks of meaning or regulatory fields consist of nothing other than former responses, acts that were frozen or habitualized long ago, which have been reinforced.”48 In this way, Vanni develops an understanding, too, of instituted forms like the law or the state, which are no longer distinguished from social events because, time and again, new responses can be found and, above all, found out in them. Responsively developed, phenomenological thought such as this is therefore directed toward deviations and shifts, toward discoveries and transformations, which make possible a rethinking of instituted forms, too, even in the sense of the latter not simply consisting only of already long reinforced responses but, rather, in the sense of being disrupted by new responses. This thought is directed, in addition, toward the pathic experience of each and every actor in the social field where—for instance, at the point of a political debate, as Vanni argues—not everything is based on the independence of the agents, on their subjective capability for autonomously beginning a speech or an action, as a result of their own power and their own decision. Rather, it becomes clear that I do not begin with myself but always already with a specific post factum in all my gestures, that is, in all my responses: “In relation to the claims they answer, these responses always come too late. Yet they always come too soon in relation to any planning done in accordance with reason, by which I could direct and gauge my action.”49 This kind of a rational determination of my action is inadequate in comparison with the urgency of my situation as a human being in the face of Others, for I have always already had to respond, have always already found out new responses, without having been able to wait to square them with existing rules. My freedom as a responsive freedom thus means as a capability to begin some other place. In this way, social claims become visible in an alteritary praxis; they arise and surface and are not simply given data. Vanni draws attention to the fact, however, that taking notice of a claim as a claim is in no way always unequivocal, “be it for the actors themselves, who raise such a claim; be it for the people or structures that ought to react to this claim, each according to their task or their function in the social network. The site of genesis is actually the site where such roles, such classifications, and such indications of attentiveness arise in the first place, time and again.”50 Resulting from the event of the claim, then, is also the responsibility that is not projected onto it from beforehand. The moment of the claim is not separated from the

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moment of the response. Rather, the responding has always already set in. “In relation to the urgency of every practical situation, I have always already begun to respond, without being able to wait. And the determination of my gestures, my identity and, above all, the approximate determination of the claim that I am responding to, and which drives my gestures, only comes after the fact, as the effect of my already given responses.”51 Does the dispositif, then, in the way Foucault posits it, not always come too late? What affirmatively speaks (Zu-Sagendes) and affirmatively activates (Zu-Tätigendes) in the sense of transdiscursive claims appear a fronte. Thus, taking that into account, the question is not how I am able to respond to a specific claim and bear responsibility for it, as well as how I am able to adapt to the existing legal norms; rather, the question is how I can interact with the already given responses, how I can connect them with the already acknowledged rules and traditions of society. “Something new is always found out in the response, in its urgency, and this discovery must then always be confronted with the existing norms afterwards in order to renew these norms or, on the contrary, to resist deviation.”52 In this regard, however, Vanni also states that nobody remains spared of this responsive constraint, for in my own practice—as, say, a politician, attorney, or social worker—I have always already responded to this question of interaction with the given responses. “Therefore, we cannot maintain any strict distinction between state and society or law and society. The force that discovers or deviates cuts across these categories.”53 In what follows, Vanni selects the example of undocumented immigrants, who do not pose simply legal questions for external experts, and whose situation is thus not as an already determinable event opposed to the state as a “social problem.” In their need, rather, they have already had to begin to follow other ways through the social net and in its holes, have already had to create other relationships in order to find a roundabout way in the conditions for working. Even those who help them—employing them without papers, for example—have to take decisions at any time and provide specific responses in advance.54 The compelling nature of claims goes across the entire social world. With a view to practical phenomena, a communal world cannot be presupposed and is always on the line as an outstanding demand. It also includes the hospitality, for example, vis-à-vis acknowledging a refugee as the obligation of accommodating Others as Others, whose alterity—as Burkhard Liebsch writes—“can turn out to be concretely deviating at any time, unforeseeably. That is normal, and it negatively surprises only those who have conceived one-sided notions of refugee status and its causes (discrimination, hate, massacres, bombing, destruction of all biological and civil bases for living,

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including trust, displacement, etc.). In the face of every refugee and thousands of refugees, whether we can commiserate with them (which is frequently the case), whether they have good or not so good reason for fleeing, whether they reveal or conceal their identity, and the like, is not only on the line. Rather, what is on the line is also hospitality itself, the hospitality that must pledge to every other person, regardless of their identity, refuge and a place to stay. Without this hospitality there is no culture at all worthy of its name.”55 On every level of response, Vanni takes note of an uncertainty, because the claims we must answer can never be entirely determined to be such. “They are themselves never entirely aware of being claims and are not recognizable as such.”56 It is here where the question as to social power sets in, which, as a force, determines what must be considered an event, what is important, unimportant, or even inconsequential. In this regard, there is always a certain amount of arbitrariness at play: a specific claim is always selected as a claim and none other. “Where specific claims are perceived, others are simultaneously cut out. We cannot get beyond this moment of selecting and the conflict that results. No answer is also an answer.”57 Vanni proposes to conceive of this uncertainty further by way of a kind of ineptness (la maladresse), by which is indicated, on the one hand, the poor deftness of gestures that are never entirely adequate to the task, which stands in contrast to the “pretentious arrogance” of an expert, and with which is pointed out, on the other hand, that “a response, or the claim that is reported in this given response, is always poorly addressed.”58 Vanni continues that this poor act of address can also be read even in the “sending” in terms of the ineptness, like a letter, namely, that had never been sent exactly to the right address. “In the case where this metaphor is not quite appropriate, there is still no correct address beyond the receipt of the letter, because the recipient is indeed only aware of being the addressee with such a letter—and it is exactly the same for the letter as for the address and for the sender as for the addressee.”59 For Vanni, we are not dealing here with any simple failure but with a creative aberration: “I can never be certain that the claim to which I have already responded was correctly addressed to me, and that my response to it is apt and appropriate; from this uncertainty, though, social relationships are discovered time and again and, as a result, the usual norms are shifted and renewed over and over.”60 It is precisely in this case where, according to Vanni, the production of all social structures takes place, including those of the modern state with its entire apparatus. These structures arise also a result of both our inventiveness and ineptness; they surface in the types of orders themselves, not outside of them. Even if a kind of urgency in a social situation compels us to rationalize and calculate, our responses that then put matters in order still remain inadequate. In this Vanni finds a kind of positive and creative pressure that presents an opportunity. “Any responsibility that fails to recognize its own inadequacy,

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its own ineptness, is not responsibility any longer. It is more about just plainly carrying out an already given procedure.”61 Therefore, it is a matter of contending that the essential ineptness of human praxis is positive, maintaining it to be an opportunity, and thus renouncing any mythology of aptitude and total control. That does not mean devolving into chaos or callinng for anarchy; it does mean, though, altering our own attitude, our own praxis, by way of a creative thinking, which is not the business of any theory or any decree set out by a government. That means, in line with Vanni, then, finding the meaning implicit in social life for ineptness, promoting that sense as well as caring for it. This requires an ethos, an acquired, practical position, one of degree and of modesty, which cannot be created immediately or artificially. Rather, this ethos must be fostered in each individual social and performative situation and on every institutional level, so as to arrive at a receptiveness vis-à-vis an always antecedent openness.

Notes

CHAPTER 1 1. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick (London: Heinemann, 1933), 22a. Furthermore, see chapter 2. 2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 89. 3. Cf. Gernot Böhme and his general theory of perception, for one, developed by way of mental states, synaesthesiae, tableaux, and ecstasies: Böhme, Aisthetik. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2001), and, for another: Böhme, Ethik leiblicher Existenz. Über unseren moralischen Umgang mit der eigenen Natur (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2008). 4. Blaise Pascal, Thoughts on Religion [and Other Subjects] (London: John Henry Parker, 1851), 104. 5. Pascal, Pensées (New York: Modern Library, 1941), [Fragment 131] 47. 6. Ibid., [Fragment 72] 23: “Man’s disproportion.” 7. Unconcealing things remains reserved for the creator, for God, according to the likewise devout, Christian understanding of Pascal. 8. As a contemporary of René Descartes, Pascal turns out to be critical vis-à-vis Descartes’ split between res cogitans and res extensa: According to Pascal, the human condition remains a puzzle; humanity lives in questions, which is why the Cartesian “I think, I doubt, I am” appears too ungrounded: who is “I”? See, for example, Descartes’ sixth meditation on the foundations of philosophy: Descartes, “Concerning the Existence of Material Things, and the Real Distinction between Mind and Body,” in Discourse on Method; and, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998), 92f. 9. Pascal, Pensées, [Fragment 277] 95. 10. Ibid., [Fragment 323] 108f. 11. See, also based on this example, the reading of Pascal in the context of social/ corporeal existence by way of ordering the body, the spirit, and love in: Bernhard Waldenfels, Idiome des Denkens. Deutsch-Französische Gedankengänge II (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2005), 32–49, specifically 39–46.

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12. Here would be the place to call additionally into question, along with Henri Bergson, openness in the emergence of societies. According to Bergson, societies are not explained on their own but emerge behind manifestations of life: “all morality, be it pressure or aspiration, is in essence biological.” See: Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Bereton with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter (London: Macmillan, 1935), 82. and cf. chapter 11.2 in this volume. 13. Jean-Paul Sartre, when he became aware of Pascal and followed his thinking in the Pensées, displaces the Other precisely onto this field. In this integrative look through the keyhole, he sees the ego for the Other in the midst of a world that “flows off” (abfließt) toward the Other. See: Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (New York: Washington Square Press, 2018), 347ff. 14. Pascal, Pensées, [Fragment 295] 102 (italics in the original). 15. In his thinking about the Other, Emmanuel Levinas puts these pensées of Pascal at the beginning and, together with him, leaves the desired “place in the sun” in order to cast a nonintegrative glance at the Other. Cf. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998). 16. Christoph Wulf, Dietmar Kamper, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Einleitung,” in Ethik der Ästhetik, ed. ibid. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), VII–XI. 17. Also of interest here—while temporally before the seventeenth-century Enlightenment pensées of Pascal treated above—are the lines of thought from antiquity. Aristotle’s concept of theoria as a spectacle, for example, as observing, contemplatio, which belongs to ethos, to positioning and is not opposed to practical action, praxis, whereas this action is distinguished from fabricating action, poiesis. Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book VI, chapter 4, 1140a, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1999), 88f. and 315 praxis (sense 3) and 344 poeisis. 18. Uwe Wirth approaches the concept in this way via John L. Austin’s “performative utterances” in the introduction of the volume he published titled Performanz. Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften. Like all concepts, performare is followed up by others. Cf. Wirth, “Der Performanzbegriff im Spannungsfeld von Illokution, Iteration und Indexikalität,” in Performanz. Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. ibid. (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2002), 9. 19. Cf. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Performativität. Eine Einführung (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2013), 37–44. 20. On these reverse sides (Kehrseiten), see the works of Barbara Gronau and Alice Lagaay, especially the introductions in their two anthologies: Gronau and Lagaay, eds., Performanzen des Nichttuns (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2008), 11–19. And: Gronau and Lagaay, eds., Ökonomien der Zurückhaltung. Kulturelles Handeln zwischen Askese und Restriktion (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2010), 7–13. 21. Maurice Blanchot, Der als letzter spricht. Über Paul Celan (Berlin: Mathias Gatza, 1993), 27. 22. Paul Celan, “Language Mesh,” trans. Michael Hamburger, in Poetry 119/3 (1971): 136.

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23. Celan, “Praise of Distance,” in Paul Celan: Selected Poems and Prose, trans. John Felstiner (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 25. 24. See also: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan: “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). 25. Cf. Levinas, “Signification and Sense,” in Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 16. 26. Ibid. (italics in the translation). 27. Ibid. 28. Edmund Husserl, Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Dordrecht: Springer, 1997), 242f. 29. Levinas, “Signification and Sense,” 10. 30. Ibid., 10. 31. Ibid., 11. 32. Ibid., 11. 33. Celan, The Meridian, trans. Pierre Joris (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 9. 34. Ibid. 35. Levinas, “Paul Celan: From Being to the Other,” in Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 41f. 36. Ibid., 41. 37. Ibid., 43. 38. Celan, “I Can Still See You,” in Poems of Paul Celan, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea Books, 1988), 299. 39. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible. Followed by Working Notes, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 149. 40. Ibid. 41. Cf. Ibid., 150f. 42. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1: Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Henry Holt, 1922), 472f. 43. Ibid., 477. 44. Ibid., 496. 45. Ibid., 501. 46. Ibid., 501f. Note that the German translation emphasizes a “most intimately felt sorrow” (“zuinnerst gefühlte Trauer”). 47. Ibid., 502. 48. Ibid., 502f. 49. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 150. 50. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1: Swann’s Way, 503. 51. Ibid., 503f. 52. Ibid., 504f. 53. Ibid., 505. 54. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 150. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 151.

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57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1: Swann’s Way, 505f. 61. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 153f.

CHAPTER 2 1. Plato, The Republic (Politeia), trans. Paul Shorey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 507a–09a. 2. Ibid., 514a–17b. 3. Ibid., 598b–99a. Cf. Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis. Kultur— Kunst—Gesellschaft (Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1992), 50–68. 4. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 980a–81a. See also his De Anima: On the Soul, Book I, trans. J. A. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931). 5. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. W. H. Fyfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), 1448a–48b. 6. Ibid., 1448b–49a. Cf. Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis. Kultur—Kunst—Gesellschaft, 81–89. 7. “The Light of the Gospel. 2 Corinthians 4:17–18,” The ESV Bible, accessed April 4, 2020, https:​//​www​.bibleserver​.com​/ESV​.KJV​/2​%20Corinthians4​%3A18. 8. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 58 (italics in the original). 9. Cf. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 2, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York: Routledge, 2001), 221f. 10. Cf. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book II. IX, ed. K. P. Winkler (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1996), 56ff. 11. Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 116. 12. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 203–06. 13. Ibid., 330ff. 14. Cf. Don Ihde, Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction (New York: Putnam, 1977), 55–66. 15. Cf. Waldenfels, Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel. Modi ästhetischer Erfahrung (Berlin: Suhrkamp: 2010), 126. 16. Cf. Gottfried Boehm, “Die Wiederkehr der Bilder,” in Was ist ein Bild?, ed. ibid. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006), 11–38. 17. Wolfgang Köhler, Die Aufgabe der Gestaltpsychologie (Berlin: De Gruyter: 1971), 106. 18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Paul Kegan, 1922), 71f. 19. William J. Tom Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 48.

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20. Eva Schürmann, “Möglichkeitsspielräume des Sichtbaren,” in Kunst. Bild. Wahrnehmung. Blick. Merleau-Ponty zum Hundertsten, ed. Antje Kapust and Bernhard Waldenfels (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2010), 98. 21. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 147, 153. 22. Ibid., 139f. (italics in the original). 23. Emmanuel Alloa, “Maurice Merleau-Ponty II—Fleisch und Differenz,” in Leiblichkeit. Geschichte und Aktualität eines Konzepts, ed. Emmanuel Alloa, Thomas Bedorf, Christian Grüny, and Tobias Nikolaus Klass (Tübingen: UTB, 2012), 50. 24. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 149. 25. Waldenfels, Hyperphänomene. Modi hyperbolischer Erfahrung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012), 104–05. 26. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 220. 27. Ibid., 247. 28. Alloa, Looking Through Images: A Phenomenology of Visual Media, trans. Nils F. Schott (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 208. 29. For Merleau-Ponty’s unpublished note, see: Alloa, Looking Through Images: A Phenomenology of Visual Media, 208, 233. 30. Ibid., 209. 31. Dieter Mersch, “Blick und Entzug. Zur ‘Logik’ ikonischer Strukturen,” in Figur und Figuration. Studien zur Wahrnehmung und Wissen, ed. Gottfried Boehm, Gabriele Brandstetter, and Achatz von Müller (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006), 56. 32. Cf. ibid., 64–66. 33. Ludger Schwarte, “Einleitung: Die Kraft des Visuellen,” in Bild-Performanz, ed. Ludger Schwarte (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2011), 13. 34. Cf. Mersch, “Tertium datur. Einleitung in eine negative Medientheorie,” in Was ist ein Medium?, ed. Stefan Münker and Alexander Roesler (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2008), 304–06. 35. Philippe Soupault, “Charlie Chaplin,” in Charlie Chaplin. Eine Ikone der Moderne, ed. Dorothee Kimmich (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2003), 167. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. To borrow a phrase from Gertrud Koch, “Was machen Filme mit uns, was machen wir mit ihnen?—Oder was lassen wir die Dinge mit uns machen?,” in: Bild-Performanz, ed. Schwarte, 233f. 40. Soupault, “Charlie Chaplin,” 178. 41. Schwarte, “Einleitung: Die Kraft des Visuellen,” 14–15. 42. Following here on the considerations of Kathrin Busch and Iris Därmann regarding the development of the performative, see: Busch and Därmann, “Einleitung,” in “Pathos”: Konturen eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2007), 7–31, esp. 20–24. 43. At this juncture, we harken back etymologically to the classical meaning of the actor as respondent, in which actors like Thespis (sixth century BCE) respond to the chorus, are in dialogue with it. Only to this signification do the additional meanings

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for the actor attach, that is, as a person who mimes a role, performs a character, stands in for a type, re-presents. 44. Waldenfels, Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel. Modi ästhetischer Erfahrung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 274–75. 45. Theodor W. Adorno, “Chaplin Times Two,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 9, no. 1 (Spring 1996), 57–61. The 1946 film was directed by William Wyler. 46. Adorno, “Chaplin Times Two,” 60. Though citing MacKay’s published translation here, a more accurate rendering would be: “It is as if he caused purposeful, grown-up life to recede—and indeed the principle of reason itself—into mimetic behavior, thereby reconciling it.” 47. Adorno, “Gold Assay,” in Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Redwood Books, 1978), 152. 48. See: Adorno, “Dialektische Epilegomena. Zu Subjekt und Objekt,” unpublished, printed in: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 10, Teil 2 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), 741–58, esp. 742f. 49. Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis. Kultur—Kunst—Gesellschaft, 396. 50. In these contexts, Adorno pays thorough attention to the body, especially the suffering body. He avoids thematizing it on his own, however, as even his dissertation about Husserl elevates, above all, the role of consciousness. By way of introduction to this topic, see: Käte Meyer-Drawe, “Leib, Körper,” in Schlüsselbegriffe der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Christian Bermes and Ulrich Dierse (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2010), 208. 51. Cf. Christian Grüny, “Theodor W. Adorno—Soma und Sensorium,” in Leiblichkeit. Geschichte und Aktualität eines Konzepts, ed. Emmanuel Alloa, Thomas Bedorf, Christian Grüny, and Tobias Nikolaus Klass (Tübingen: UTB, 2012), 256–58. 52. Waldenfels, Antwortregister (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2007), 466–77. 53. Other approaches to the situation in Malibu are offered by Jürgen Habermas. He opts for a metaphorical avenue in which the “metallic claw of [Russell’s] prosthetic forearm,” the “coldness of the metal” of the prosthesis, and the “speechless mimesis of the great clown” Chaplin provide the motives for Adorno’s language and for “his evocative analyses,” See: Habermas, “Theodor W. Adorno. Urgeschichte der Subjektivität und verwilderte Selbstbehauptung,” in Philosophisch-politische Profile (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1971), 167–79. Reprinted in: Habermas, Politik, Kunst, Religion. Essays über zeitgenössische Philosophen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1986), 33f. 54. Inspired by Habermas, Adorno’s student Gunzelin Schmid Noerr shifts the emphasis to the handshake as a “kind of bridge between various realms of communicative action.” See: Schmid Noerr, “Adornos Erschaudern. Variationen über den Händedruck,” in Vierzig Jahre Flaschenpost: Dialektik der Aufklärung, ed. Willem van Reijen and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, 1947–1987 (Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 1987), 236–38. 55. See: Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 52. 56. Ibid., 55f. 57. Ibid., 52. 58. Ibid., 50f. (Italics in the translation).

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59. Cf. Thomas Bedorf, “Emmanuel Levinas—Der Leib des Anderen,” in Leiblichkeit. Geschichte und Aktualität eines Konzepts, ed. Emmanuel Alloa, Thomas Bedorf, Christian Grüny, and Tobias Nikolaus Klass (Tübingen: UTB, 2012), 68f. 60. Levinas, On Escape, 64. Cf. Michael Mayer, Humanismus im Widerstreit. Versuch über Passibilität (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012), e.g., chapter 2: “Das Subjekt jenseits seines Grundes. Zur Deduktion des Selbstbewusstseins: Lévinas,” 31f. 61. Levinas, On Escape, 64. 62. Ibid., 65. 63. Cf. Levinas, On Escape, 62. 64. Ibid., 65 (italics in the translation). 65. Cf. Levinas, “Signification and Sense,” 17. 66. Cf. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 130–43. 67. Pascal Delhom, “Emmanuel Levinas,” in Bildtheorien aus Frankreich. Ein Handbuch, ed. Kathrin Busch and Iris Därmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2011), 208. 68. Levinas, “Signification and Sense,” 33. 69. Adorno, “Chaplin Times Two,” 57–61. 70. Søren Kierkegaard, as cited in Adorno, “Chaplin Times Two,” 58. 71. Cf. Kierkegaard, Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 61–70. 72. Ibid., 104. Cf. Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, in Gesammelte Schriften, Band 2, (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), 24f. 73. Cf. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Volume II, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944). As the third stage, the religious is added. In order of precedence, the aesthetic stage is defined as immediacy, the ethical as mediating in independent activity. The religious, the Christian connects both these in the belief in God. 74. Adorno, “Chaplin Times Two,” 58. 75. Cf. Kierkegaard, Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 68. Accordingly, the new German translation by Hans Rochol says of Beckmann: “He is not only able to walk, but he is also able to come having walked.” (“Er kann nicht nur gehen, sondern er kann gegangen kommen.”) See: Kierkegaard, Die Wiederholung, trans. Hans Rochol (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2000), 36. 76. Cf. Adorno, “Transparencies on Film,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, New German Critique No. 24/25 (Autumn 1981–Winter 1982), 203. 77. Ibid., 200. 78. See: Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung. Phänomenologie, Psychoanalyse, Phänomenotechnik (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2002), 10, 14f. 79. Waldenfels, Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel. Modi ästhetischer Erfahrung (Berlin: Suhrkamp: 2010), 275.

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CHAPTER 3 1. Cf. Théophile Gautier, Avatar, Çevirmen: Kemal Ergezen, 2015 and see: Dirk Backes, Heinrich Hoerle. Leben und Werk 1895–1936, Katalog Kölner Kunstverein (Köln–Bonn: Rheinland Verlag, 1981), Werkverzeichnis (WVZ), Teil IV: Druckgraphik, no. 31, 216. 2. Cf. Backes, Heinrich Hoerle. Leben und Werk 1895–1936, Katalog Kölner Kunstverein (Köln-Bonn: Rheinland Verlag, 1981), 210f. WVZ Teil IV: Druckgraphik, no. 17. 3. Ibid., 116. Reprint of the Issue 20, 2nd series, Cologne, December 1931, 77–80. 4. Cf. ibid., 57. WVZ Teil I: Ölgemälde, no. 18. 5. Cf. ibid., 77. WVZ Teil I: Ölgemälde, no. 67. 6. Cf. exhibition catalogue: Das wahre Gesicht unserer Zeit. Bilder vom Menschen in der Zeichnung der Neuen Sachlichkeit, ed. Uwe Fleckner and Dirk Luckow (Kiel: Kunsthalle zu Kiel, 2004), especially the entry on Hoerle in it by Petra Henninger, 94–96. 7. In this regard, see also the hand extended by Adorno, which event we used to thematize comparable links in chapter 2.3 of the present volume. 8. Delhom, “Phänomenologie der erlittenen Gewalt,” in Gesichter der Gewalt. Beiträge aus phänomenologischer Sicht, ed. Michael Staudigl (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2014), 158. 9. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (New York: Springer, 1991), 225. 10. Delhom, “Phänomenologie der erlittenen Gewalt,” 156. 11. In particular, it also means not to describe violence merely with concepts like bestiality or animality but, rather, to bring them back into the human realm of responsibility so that they clearly bring the corresponding links there to the fore. 12. Delhom, “Phänomenologie der erlittenen Gewalt,” 156. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 157. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 157, and Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 223. See also chapters 2.3 and 4.2 in the present volume. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 158. 19. Ibid., 159. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 160–61. 22. Ibid., 161–62. 23. Gautier, Avatar, or the Double Transformation, in Complete Works, vol. 13, trans. Frederick C. de Sumichrast (New York: E. R. Dumont, 1902), 13f. 24. Cf. Terence, The Self-Tormentor, trans. John Sargeaunt (London: William Heinemann, 1918), 125, l.77: “Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto.” 25.See, for instance: Philipp Melanchthon, De miseriis paedagogorum. Über die Leiden der Lehrer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2018), 6f. Further examples inspired by

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Terence’s maxim can be found in Cicero, Seneca, Montaigne, Herder, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Kant, and Novalis. 26. Plato, Charmides, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 166b–d. 27. Cf. chapter 7 on the pathology of the body in this volume, in particular section 7.3 about the pedagogy for the senses. 28. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 198. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Gautier, Avatar, or the Double Transformation, 85f. 32. Ibid., 69. 33. Ibid., 144. 34. See chapter 5 in this volume on the responsivity of the body, in particular section 5.1 on the topical and the habitual nature of the body. 35. Käte Meyer-Drawe, Menschen im Spiegel ihrer Maschinen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1996), 140. 36. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 215. Cf. Meyer-Drawe, Menschen im Spiegel ihrer Maschinen, 140. And see chapter 2 on being visible, rendering visible, and being invisible in this volume. 37. Michel Tibon-Cornillot, “Die transfigurativen Körper. Zur Verflechtung von Techniken und Mythen,” in Die Wiederkehr des Körpers, ed. Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1982), 146. And: Meyer-Drawe, Menschen im Spiegel ihrer Maschinen, 140. 38. Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters, a Bilingual Edition, trans. Wallace Fowlie, rev. Seth Whidden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 370f. [Letter to Georgebo, Charleville, May 13, 1871]. Note that the German translation is more faithful to the original French: “Gegenwärtig lasse ich mich so sehr wie nur möglich verlumpen. Warum? Ich will Dichter sein, und ich arbeite daran, mich zum Seher zu machen; Sie verstehen natürlich gar nichts, und ich kann es Ihnen kaum erklären. Es geht darum, durch die Verwirrung aller Sinne im Unbekannten anzukommen. Die Leiden sind gewaltig, aber man muß stark sein, als Dichter geboren sein, und ich habe mich als Dichter erkannt. Das ist ganz und gar nicht mein Fehler. Es ist falsch, zu sagen: Ich denke. Man müßte sagen: Ich werde gedacht.—Verzeihen Sie das Wortspiel. ICH ist ein anderer. Umso schlimmer für das Holz, wenn es sich als Geige wiederfindet, und Hohn über die Ahnungslosen, die über das rechten, wovon sie nicht das Geringste verstehen!” in “Die Seher-Briefe. Rimbaud an Georges Izambard, Charleville, 13. Mai 1871,” in Sämtliche Dichtungen. Zweisprachige Ausgabe (Munich: dtv, 1997), 367, 369. 39. Tim Trzaskalik, “Auf den zweiten Blick,” in Die Zukunft der Dichtung. Die Seher-Briefe. Mit Essays von Philippe Beck und Tim Trzaskalik, Arthur Rimbaud (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2010), 84. 40. Ibid., 84–85. 41. Rimbaud, Complete Works, 370f. 42. Trzaskalik, “Auf den zweiten Blick,” 90. See, too, Rimbaud’s correspondence with the poet Paul Demeny, which takes place at roughly the same time, and in

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which Rimbaud pursues similar, albeit more detailed, approaches as well. See, again: Rimbaud’s “Lettres du Voyant” (May 13 and 15, 1871) in his Complete Works, 370f. 43. Trzaskalik, “Auf den zweiten Blick,” 91. 44. Ibid. 45. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, 138. 46. Levinas, “Humanism and Anarchy,” in Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 52. Here, Levinas turns against Fichte and Sartre and their thinking of the subject as of one which everything goes back to, even in its own positing, which it owes to itself. 47. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, 138. 48. Ibid., 139.

CHAPTER 4 1. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 46. 2. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Spirit (Jena Lectures 1805– 6), pt. II. Actual Spirit, A. Recognition, in Hegel and the Human Spirit. A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805–6), ed. Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 120. 3. Agamben, Nudities, 46. 4. Ibid., 48. 5. Ibid. 6. Cf. Richard Weihe, Die Paradoxie der Maske. Geschichte einer Form (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2004), 35f. 7. Cf. Hans Belting, Das echte Bild. Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2006), 47. 8. Cf. Meyer-Drawe, “Wer schön sein will—muss leiden?,” in Vom Zauber des Schönen. Reiz, Begehren und Zerstörung, ed. Konrad Paul Liessmann (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2010), 208. 9. Cf. Ibid. 10. Cf. Belting, Das echte Bild. Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen, 83–85. 11. Cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988). 12. Kobo Abe, The Face of Another, trans. E. Dale Saunders (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 19. 13. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 351. 14. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Burton Pike (Urbana-Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), 3. 15. Meyer-Drawe, “Wer schön sein will—muss leiden?,” 209. 16. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 352. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 253.

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19. Cf. Mersch, Was sich zeigt. Materialität, Präsenz, Ereignis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2002), 47–74. 20. Abe, The Face of Another, 27f. 21. See also the mulitple forms of perspectivation branching widely out from this dimension in Person: Anthropologische, phänomenologische und analytische Perspektiven, ed. Inga Römer and Matthias Wunsch (Münster: Mentis Verlag, 2013). 22. Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, in Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark Taylor (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 352 (italics added). 23. Ibid., 351. 24. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, 5. 25. Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” 351. 26. Waldenfels, Das leibliche Selbst. Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des Leibes (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2000), 298. 27. Ibid., 243. 28. Ibid., 391. 29. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 216. 30. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, 125f. 31. Levinas, “The I and the Totality,” in Entre Nous. Thinking of the Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 30. 32. On illeity, see the volume dedicated to Levinas by Roger Laporte, La Veille (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1963). 33. Werner Stegmaier, “Die Bindung des Bindenden. Levinas’ Konzeption des Politischen,” in Im Angesicht der Anderen. Levinas’ Philosophie des Politischen, ed. Pascal Delhom and Alfred Hirsch (Zürich–Berlin: Diaphanes Verlag, 2005), 30. 34. Ibid. Here, Stegmaier concurs in particular with the considerations of Delhom and Waldenfels. See: Pascal Delhom, Der Dritte. Lévinas’ Philosophie zwischen Verantwortung und Gerechtigkeit (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2000, as well as Waldenfels, Antwortregister. 35. Stegmaier, “Die Bindung des Bindenden. Levinas’ Konzeption des Politischen,” 30. 36. Ibid., 31. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Cf. Mersch, “Von der Destruktion der Ontologie zur Grundlegung einer Sozialphilosophie des ‘anderen Menschen’” in Der Andere in der Geschichte—Sozialphilosophie im Zeichen des Krieges. Ein kooperativer Kommentar zu Emmanuel Levinas’ Totalität und Unendlichkeit, ed. Burkhard Liebsch (Freiburg i. Br.–Munich: Karl Alber Verlag, 2016), 369f. 40. Stegmaier, “Die Bindung des Bindenden. Levinas’ Konzeption des Politischen,” 30. 41. Ibid., 31f. Cf. Elisabeth Weber, Jüdisches Denken in Frankreich. Gespräche. (Frankfurt/M.: Jüdischer Verlag, 1994), 212.

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42. Stegmaier, “Die Bindung des Bindenden. Levinas’ Konzeption des Politischen,” 32. 43. Levinas, “Ethics and Politics,” in The Levinas Reader, trans. Jonathan Romney, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 294. 44. Delhom, “Butler und Levinas über das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Ethik und Politik,” in Staat, Politik, Ethik. Zum Staatsverständnis Judith Butlers, ed. Lars Distelhorst (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2016), 93. 45. Ibid. 46. Judith Butler, “Levinas trahi? La réponse de Butler,” La Philosophie Blog, Le Monde, March 21, 2013, accessed April 4, 2020, http:​//​laphilosophie​.blog​.lemonde​ .fr​/2013​/03​/21​/levinas​-trahi​-la​-reponse​-de​-judith​-butler​/, translated and cited by Delhom, in: “Butler und Levinas über das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Ethik und Politik,” 93. Butler responds in her blog entry to statements by the Canadian philosopher Bruno Chaouat from March 13, 2013 (ibid.), who reacts to Butler’s portrayal of Levinas, as found in her work Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 47. Ibid. Cf. Butler, “Levinas trahi? La réponse de Butler” and Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, 159f. 48. Time and again, Butler relates critically to Levinas. Most recently, see: “Precarious Life and the Ethics of Cohabitation,” in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 99–122, in which she continues her critique on the facelessness of the Palestinians on the same basis. 49. Sabine Gürtler, “Gipfel und Abgrund. Die Kritik von Luce Irigaray an Emmanuel Levinas’ Verständnis der Geschlechterdifferenz,” in Phänomenologie der Geschechterdifferenz, ed. Silvia Stoller and Helmut Vetter (Vienna: Facultas, 1997), 111f. Cf. Luce Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 5–19 and see: Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 53. 50. Ibid. 51. Stegmaier, “Der Umsturz der ethischen Orientierung des Menschen,” in Der Andere in der Geschichte—Sozialphilosophie im Zeichen des Krieges. Ein kooperativer Kommentar zu Emmanuel Levinas’ Totalität und Unendlichkeit, ed. Burkhard Liebsch (Freiburg i. Br.–Munich: Karl Alber Verlag, 2016), 274f. 52. Ibid. 53. Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), 95. 54. Ibid., 94. 55. Plato, Philebus, trans. Reginald Hackforth, The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1961), 1086–150, 51d, 1133, as part of the passage beginning with 50e on 1132f. 56. Paul Valéry, “Canticle of the Columns,” trans. Louise Bogan and May Sarton, Poetry XCIV/1 (April 1959), 1–2, accessed November 2, 2022, https:​//​www​ .poetryfoundation​.org​/poetrymagazine​/browse​?volume​=94​&issue​=1​&page​=12. 57. Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” 94.

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58. Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Oliver Ready (New York: Penguin Classics, 2014), 296. 59. Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” 94. 60. Ibid., 95. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Waldenfels, Idiome des Denkens, 190. 64. Cf. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 178. 65. Cf. Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” 95–98 (italics added). 66. Ibid., 98. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., 102. 70. Cf. Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” 115f. 71. Levinas, “The Other, Utopia, and Justice,” in Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 232. Cf. Vasily Grossmann, Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 1987), 405f. 72. Cf. Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” 103. 73. Ibid., 106.

CHAPTER 5 1. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1960), 111: V. Meditation, §50. 2. Ibid. 3. Cf. Henri Matisse, “Jazz,” in Matisse on Art, ed. Jack D. Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 172. 4. Ibid., 174. 5. See Matisse’s essay of the same name on artistic creation in Matisse on Art, ed. Jack D. Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 217–19. 6. Ibid., 218. 7. See: Jean Starobinski, “The Grimacing Double,” in The Great Parade: Portrait of the Artist as Clown, ed. Gérard Régnier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 16f. 8. Matisse, “Jazz,” 218. 9. Cf. Waldenfels, Das leibliche Selbst, 181–201, quote 185. 10. Waldenfels, Das Zwischenreich des Dialogs. Sozialphilosophische Untersuchungen im Anschluß an Edmund Husserl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1971), 45. 11. Ibid., 47. 12. Ibid., 49.

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13. Cf. ibid., xii. Also see: Michael Theunissen, Der Andere. Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart (Berlin–New York: De Gruyter, 1977), 58f. 14. Waldenfels, Das leibliche Selbst, 9. 15. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. Fred Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), 166. Cf. Waldenfels, “Fremdheit des anderen Geschlechts,” in Phänomenologie der Geschlechterdifferenz, ed. Silvia Stoller and Helmut Vetter (Vienna: Facultas, 1997), 63. 16. Waldenfels, Das leibliche Selbst, 285. 17. Ibid., 287. 18. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–1952, trans. Talia Welsh (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 141. 19. Waldenfels, Das leibliche Selbst, 190. 20. Antje Kapust, “Responsive Philosophie. Darlegung der Grundzüge,” in Philosophie der Responsivität. Festschrift für Bernhard Waldenfels, ed. Kathrin Busch and Iris Därmann, Antje Kapust (Munich: Wilhem Fink Verlag, 2007), 22f. 21. Waldenfels, Antwortregister, 465. 22. Ibid. 23. Cf. Waldenfels, Sozialität und Alterität. Modi sozialer Erfahrung (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2015), 19f. 24. Cf. Kurt Goldstein, Der Aufbau des Organismus. Einführung in die Biologie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Erfahrung am kranken Menschen (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2014), 347f. 25. Cf. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. and ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 346. 26. Cf. Waldenfels, Platon. Zwischen Logos und Pathos, (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017), 9–18. 27. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 183. 28. Waldenfels, Platon. Zwischen Logos und Pathos (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017), 50. 29. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 293. 30. Waldenfels, Platon. Zwischen Logos und Pathos, 51. Cf. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 279f. and Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 197. For an introduction, see also: Carina Pape, Autonome Teilhaftigkeit und teilhaftige Autonomie. Der Andere in Michail M. Bachtins Frühwerk (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2015). 31. Cf. Waldenfels, Antwortregister, 465. 32. Cf. Busch, Därmann, “Pathos”: Konturen eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs. 33. Waldenfels, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung. Phänomenologie, Psychoanalyse, Phänomenotechnik (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2002), 10. See also chapter 2.3 in this volume. 34. Waldenfels, Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel. Modi ästhetischer Erfahrung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 274.

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35. Waldenfels, Schattenrisse der Moral (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2006), 56. 36. Cf. Waldenfels, “Ethik vom Anderen her,” in Der Anspruch des Anderen. Perspektiven phänomenologischer Ethik, ed. Bernhard Waldenfels and Iris Därmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1998), 7–14. 37. Cf. Waldenfels, “Bewährungsproben der Phänomenologie,” Philosophische Rundschau 57, no. 2, (2010): 154–78. 38. Ibid., 157. 39. Ibid. In the original German: “Was zu sagen ist, geht hinaus über das, was schon gesagt ist.” 40. Ibid., 159. 41. Ibid., 160. 42. Ibid., 161. 43. Ibid., 164. 44. Ibid., 167. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 168. 47. Ibid., 171. 48. Ibid., 177.

CHAPTER 6 1. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 147f. 2. Ibid., 148. 3. Ibid., 269. 4. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 154–73: “The Body in Its Sexual Being.” 5. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 264. 6. Ibid., 269. 7. Ibid., 149. 8. Ibid., 269. 9. Ibid., 149. 10. Ibid., 270. 11. Ibid., 271. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 149. 16. See the work of the DFG-Network Kulturen der Leiblichkeit (Cultures of Corporeality) from 2011 to 2014, as well as the resulting four-part series of the same name published by Verlag Velbrück Wissenschaft, i.e,: Leib und Sprache, vol. 1, ed. Emmanuel Alloa and Miriam Fischer; Leib–Körper–Politik, vol. 2, ed. Thomas Bedorf and Tobias N. Klass; Ränder der Darstellung, vol. 3, ed. by Christian Grüny;

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and Techniken des Leibes, vol. 4, ed. Jörg Sternagel and Fabian Goppelsröder (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2016). 17. In this regard, see Merleau-Ponty’s considerations already in The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), especially the introduction concerning “The problem of the relations of consciousness and nature,” 3–5. 18. See, furthermore: Sabeth Kerkhoff, “Das Be-deuten des Anderen,” in Kraft der Alterität. Ethische und aisthetische Dimensionen des Performativen, ed. Jörg Sternagel, Dieter Mersch, and Lisa Stertz (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2015), 119–31. 19. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 263. 20. Ibid., 263f. 21. Ibid., 266. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Anna Orlikowski, Merleau-Pontys Weg zur Welt der rohen Wahrnehmung (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012), 13. 25. Cf. Ibid., 15. 26. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 151 (italics in the original). 27. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 205. Cf. chapter 2.1 above. 28. Orlikowski, Merleau-Pontys Weg zur Welt der rohen Wahrnehmung, 90. 29. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 82. 30. Orlikowski, Merleau-Pontys Weg zur Welt der rohen Wahrnehmung, 91. 31. Ibid., 90f. 32. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 264. 33. Orlikowski, Merleau-Pontys Weg zur Welt der rohen Wahrnehmung, 160. 34. Ibid.,160f. 35. Ibid., 161. 36. Ibid. 37. Alessandro Delcò, Merleau-Ponty und die Erfahrung der Schöpfung (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2013), 14. 38. Ibid., 182. 39. See also the discussion of Delcò’s book, in the original French version, by Karl Mertens: “Alessandro Delcò: Merleau-Ponty et l’expérience de la création. Du paradigme au schème,” in Phänomenologische Forschungen (2007): 222–26. 40. Delcò, Merleau-Ponty und die Erfahrung der Schöpfung, 15. 41. Ibid., 16. 42. Ibid., 17. 43. Ibid., 18. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 133. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 134. 49. Ibid. 50. Cf. Delcò, Merleau-Ponty und die Erfahrung der Schöpfung, 113.

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51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 114. 53. Ibid. 54. Frank Vogelsang, Identität in einer offenen Wirklichkeit: eine Spurensuche im Anschluss an Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur und Waldenfels (Freiburg i. Br.–Munich: Karl Alber Verlag, 2014), 59. 55. Waldenfels, Idiome des Denkens, 87. 56. Vogelsang, Identität in einer offenen Wirklichkeit, 61. 57. Ibid., 68. 58. Ibid. 59. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs, trans. Richard McCreary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 173ff. 60. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 352. Cf. Vogelsang, Identität in einer offenen Wirklichkeit, 84. 61. In this regard, see Bedorf’s comparison of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas in thinking about relationships of alterity: Bedorf, “Emmanuel Levinas. Der Leib des Anderen,” in Leiblichkeit. Geschichte und Aktualität eines Konzepts, ed. Emmanuel Alloa, Thomas Bedorf, Christian Grüny, and Tobias Nikolaus (Tübingen: UTB, 2012), Klass, 68–80, especially 70–75. 62. Vogelsang, Identität in einer offenen Wirklichkeit, 84. 63. Ibid., 85. 64. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, 136. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 137. 67. Ibid.

CHAPTER 7 1. Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State Universtiy of New York Press, 1992), 66. 2. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, trans. Stanley Corngold (New York: Modern Library, 2013), 3. 3. Kafka, “Letter to Kurt Wolff Verlag, Prague, October 25, 1915,” in Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (London: John Calder, 1977), 114f. 4. Ibid., 115. 5. Gesa Schneider, Das Andere schreiben. Kafkas fotografische Poetik (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2008), 26. 6. Ibid., 23. 7. Kafka, The Metamorphosis, trans. Stanley Corngold (New York: Modern Library, 2013), 17. 8. Schneider, Das Andere schreiben. Kafkas fotografische Poetik, 29. 9. Ibid.

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10. Patrice Djoufack, Der Selbe und der Andere. Formen und Strategien der Erfahrung der Fremde bei Franz Kafka (Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 2005), 128. 11. Ibid., 129. 12. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 58. 13. Ibid. 14. Kafka, diary entry from January 19, 1914, in Diaries, 1910–1923, trans. Martin Greenberg with Hannah Arendt, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 253. 15. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 58–60. 16. See, among others, Kafka, “Letter to Elli Hermann [Prague, autumn 1921],” in Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (London: John Calder, 1977), 294f. 17. Cf. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Robert Greenberg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 38–46, esp. 41–44. 18. Kafka, “Letter to Elli Hermann [Prague, autumn 1921],” 294. 19. Ibid. 20. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 14. 21. Ibid., 7f. 22. Ibid. 23. Cf. Ibid., 14f. 24. Ibid., 15. 25. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 92. 26. Kafka, diary entry from December 13, 1914, in Diaries, 1910–1923, 321. 27. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 90. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 91 (italics added). 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. As cited/translated in Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 91. However, cf. Kafka, diary entry from July 28, 1914, in Diaries, 1910–1923, 295. The passage, as translated in this Brod edition, reads: “If I can’t take refuge in some work, I am lost. Is my knowledge of this as clear as the thing itself? I shun people not because I want to live quietly, but rather because I want to die quietly.” 35. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 92. 36. Ibid., 93. 37. Ibid., 86. 38. Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 1. 39. Ibid. 40. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 24.

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41. Ibid. 42. No “model,” no categorization of my writing as “cultural technology” (Kulturtechnik) can compensate for this occurrence. In this case Blanchot is presenting a kind of thought in motion, which cannot be conceptually coopted and remains “vague.” See, however, Sandro Zanetti’s attempt to halt precisely this move by way of a similar “tyrannical prehension” in Blanchot, so as to dismiss it afterward in its “model-building” as “highly speculative” and to discount it as being “richly obscure” as a “model.” See: Zanetti, “Einleitung,” in Schreiben als Kulturtechnik, ed. Sandro Zanetti (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2015), 17 as well as Blanchot, “Das verfolgende Greifen,” in Schreiben als Kulturtechnik, ed. Zanetti (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2015), 237–39. 43. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 25. 44. Ibid. 45. Cf. ibid., 141f. 46. Rilke, “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.,” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. and ed. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House. 1982), 49f. 47. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 170. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 171. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 172. 59. Ibid. 60. Rilke, Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, pt. 2., XIII, trans. Alfred Poulin Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 162f. Cf. also Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 241. 61. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 241. 62. Ibid., 241f. 63. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 72 (italics in the original). 64. Wilhelm Kamlah, Philosophische Anthropologie. Sprachkritische Grundlegung und Ethik (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1973), 35. 65. Cf. ibid., 36. 66. Cf. ibid., 37. 67. Ibid., 49. 68. Ibid. 69. Waldenfels, “Das überbewältigte Leiden. Eine pathologische Betrachtung,” in Leiden, ed. Willi Oelmüller (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1986), 131. 70. Ibid.

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71. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 22. Cf. Waldenfels, “Das überbewältigte Leiden,” 132. 72. Guadalupe Nettel, The Body Where I Was Born, trans. J. T. Lichtenstein (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2015), 7. 73. Aldous Huxley, The Art of Seeing, London: Macmillan, 1949, 50. 74. Regarding this manner of contemplating praxis, see additionally Bedorf, “Leibliche Praxis. Zum Körperbegriff der Praxistheorien, ” in Praxis denken. Konzepte und Kritik, ed. Thomas Alkemeyer, Volker Schürmann, and Jörg Volbers (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2015), 129–50. 75. Nettel, The Body Where I Was Born, 7–8. 76. Ibid., 8. 77. Ibid., 8–9. 78. See Nettel’s ideas in the speech she gave on the occasion of being awarded the Anna-Seghers-Preis in the Landesmuseum Mainz, 2009, printed in: Nettel, Argonautenschiff. Jahrbuch der Anna-Seghers-Gesellschaft Berlin und Mainz e.V. 19/2010, 26–29. 79. See, among others: Brendan Riley, “An Interview with Guadalupe Nettel,” in Bookslut, June 12, 2014, accessed April 4, 2020, http:​//​www​.bookslut​.com​/features​ /2014​_06​_020683​.php. In this regard, see also Nettel’s narrative “Guerra en los basureros,” in El matrimonio de los peces rojos, Madrid 2013, 43–62, translated into English as Guadalupe Nettel, “War in Trash Cans,” in Natural Histories, trans. J. T. Lichtenstein (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2014), 41–60. 80. Allen Ginsberg, “Song,” in Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2006), 50–53.

CHAPTER 8 1. See Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875–93. 2. Ibid., 875. 3. Adolf Furtwängler, “Gorgones und Gorgo. Wesen und Mythos,” in Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie, ed. Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1890), 1695–727. 4. See: Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?,” trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs 7, no. 1 (Autumn, 1981): 44. See also: Aisthesis. Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik, ed. Karlheinz Barck, Peter Gente, Heidi Paris, and Stefan Richter (Leipzig: Reclam, 1990), 102. 5. Ibid., 51. 6. Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 876. 7. Ibid. 8. Cf. Elisabeth Schäfer, Die offene Seite der Schrift. J.D. und H.C. Côte à côte (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2008), 89–94.

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9. Cixous, “When I Do Not Write, It Is as If I Had Died,” trans. Elizabeth Lindley, in White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, ed. Susan Sellers (New York: Routledge, 2008), 55. 10. Cixous, “Poetry Is/and Political,” trans. Ann Liddle, in Bread & Roses 2, no. 1 (January 1980): 16f. 11. Ibid. 12. Eva Waniek, Hélène Cixous: Entlang einer Theorie der Schrift (Vienna: Turia & Kant, 1993), 104. 13. Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 888. 14. Ibid., 890. 15. Ibid., 893. 16. Claudia Simma, “Anmerkungen zur Übersetzung,” in Hélène Cixous Das Lachen der Medusa zusammen mit aktuellen Beiträgen, ed. Esther Hutfless, Gertrude Postl, and Elisabeth Schäfer (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2013), 70. 17. Cf. die tageszeitung, August 4, 2014, accessed November 2, 2022, https:​//​taz​.de​ /Helene​-Cixous​-ueber​-Amoral​-und​-Poesie​/!5036304​/. 18. See an additional interview with Cixous (paraphrased above): “Guardian of Language: An Interview with Hélène Cixous,” by Kathleen O’Grady, Trinity College, University of Cambridge, March 1996, accessed April 4, 2020, http:​//​bailiwick​.lib​ .uiowa​.edu​/wstudies​/cixous​/index​.html. 19. Ibid. 20. Hélène Cixous, L’Ange au secret (Paris 1991), as cited in: Mireille Calle-Gruber, “Portrait of the Writing,” in Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, trans. Eric Prenowitz, ed. Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber (New York: Routledge, 1997), 142. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Oval Portrait,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry & Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), 481. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 482. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 483f. 30. Calle-Gruber, “Portrait of the Writing,” in Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, 142. 31. Ibid., 143. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Plato, Phaedrus, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, 275c–d. 35. Ibid., 275d–e. 36. Translated from the German in: Calle, “Über das Weibliche als Denkversuch. Zur Einführung,” in Über das Weibliche, ed. Calle (Düsseldorf: Parerga, 1996), 10. The corresponding introduction to Du féminin (Grenoble: Presses universitaires Grenoble,

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1992) was markedly abbreviated in the English translation. See: Calle-Gruber, On the Feminine, trans. Catherine McGann (Atlantic Highlands: Humanity Books, 1996). 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Calle-Gruber, “Portrait of the Writing,” 143. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Cixous, L’Ange au secret (Paris 1991), as cited in Calle-Gruber, “Portrait of the Writing,” 143. 44. Cixous, “Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata, Cixous (New York: Routledge, 1998), 115. 45. Calle-Gruber, “Portrait of the Writing,” 144. Cf. Cixous, L’Ange au secret, 70. 46. Calle-Gruber, “Portrait of the Writing,” 144. 47. Ibid., 146f. 48. Elisabeth Schäfer, “Hélène Cixous’ Life Writings—Writing a Life Oder: Das Auto-/Biographische ist nicht privat,” in Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie, Band 3: Pathos/Passibilität, 2017, 90. 49. Cixous, The Day I Wasn’t There (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 18. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 18f. 52. Ibid., 19. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 21f.

CHAPTER 9 1. Cf. the original interview in French: Ornette Coleman, Jacques Derrida, “‘La langue de l’autre.’ Ornette Coleman et Jacques Derrida,” in Les Inrockuptibles 115 (August 20, 1997): 37–45. And the text for the lecture: Jacques Derrida, “Joue—le prénom,” in Les Inrockuptibles 115 (August 20, 1997): 41f. 2. “The Other’s Language: Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette Coleman, 23 June 1997,” trans. Timothy S. Murphy, Genre 37, no. 2 (June 2004): 322f. 3. Cf. Roland Borgards, “1997. Dekonstruktion und Free Jazz (Ornette Coleman und Jacques Derrida),” in Improvisation und Invention. Momente, Modelle, Medien., ed. Sandro Zanetti (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2014), 72. 4. Ibid., 71. 5. Ibid., 74. 6. Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking,” in Heinrich von Kleist. Selected Writings, Heinrich von Kleist, trans. and ed. David Constantine (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004), 406.

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7. Ibid., 407. 8. Note that in the original French interview, Coleman’s statement read: “Je pense que le son a une relation beaucoup plus démocratique à l’information, parce qu’on n’a pas besoin d’alphabet pour compendre la musique,” in Les Inrockuptibles 115 (August 20, 1997): 38. See, too: Borgards, “1997. Dekonstruktion und Free Jazz (Ornette Coleman und Jacques Derrida),” 75. 9. Derrida in conversation with Chérif, in: Islam and the West: In Conversation With Jacques Derrida, Mustapha Chérif, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 44f. 10. Ibid., 43. 11. Derrida, “The Reason of the Strongest (Are There Rogue States?),” in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, Derrida, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 91. 12. Ibid., 91f (italics in the translation). 13. Borgards, “1997. Dekonstruktion und Free Jazz (Ornette Coleman und Jacques Derrida),” 78. 14. Derrida, “The Reason of the Strongest (Are There Rogue States?),” 92. 15. “The Other’s Language: Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette Coleman, 23 June 1997,” 325f. 16. Translated from the German in Calle-Gruber, “Über das Weibliche als Denkversuch. Zur Einführung,” 10. 17. From the German translation of Derrida, “Die Geschlechterdifferenz lesen,” in Über das Weibliche, 92. 18. Ibid., 86. 19. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1. 20. Ibid. 21. Jürgen Trabant, Was ist Sprache? (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2008), 232f. 22. Ibid., 233f. 23. Elias Canetti, The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979), 70f. 24. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, 2. 25. Cf. Descartes, “Regulae ad directionem ingenii. Cogitationes privatae,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I., trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2. 26. David Wills, “Automatic Life, So Life: Descartes,” in Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 39f. 27. Trabant, Was ist Sprache?, 236. 28. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, 78. 29. Ibid., 78f. 30. Ibid., 91. 31. Cf. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 79–153. See chapter 4 in this volume as well. 32. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, 14.

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33. See “Hospitality” (chapter 7, book 1) in Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1973). 34. Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace (1795),” in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 328f. 35. Derrida, Of Hospitality. Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacque Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 27. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 29. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 77. 40. Derrida, “Die Gesetze der Gastfreundschaft,” speech held at the opening of Heinrich von Kleist Institute of Literature and Politics at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt an der Oder, June 20, 1996, in Perspektiven europäischer Gastlichkeit. Geschichte-Kulturelle Praktiken-Kritik, ed. Burkhard Liebsch, Michael Staudigl, and Philipp Stoellger (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2016), 139. 41. Ibid. 42. Michael Wetzel, “Alienationen. Jacques Derridas Dekonstruktion der Muttersprache,” in Die Einsprachigkeit des Anderen oder die ursprüngliche Prothese, Jacques Derrida (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2003), 148, from the afterword to the German translation of: Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin. 43. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, 85. For the interview with Gaus, see also: Hannah Arendt, “‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” trans. John Stambaugh, in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 3–24. 44. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, 85. 45. Ibid., 85f. 46. Ibid., 6. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 88. 49. Ibid., 90. 50. Cf. Derrida, Of Hospitality, 89. 51. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, 24. 52. Ibid.

CHAPTER 10 1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 22. 2. Ibid., 7. Note that the (original) English version of Arendt’s text makes a rather vague distinction between “labour” and “work,” which the German edition renders somewhat more specifically as “Arbeiten” (laboring/working) and “Herstellen” (fabricating/producing). In our translation here, the German distinction is maintained.

Notes

221

3. Cf. Arendt, Vita activa oder vom tätigen Leben (Munich–Berlin: Piper, 2015). Translating from the German edition here, which improves on the original English, given the discrepancy noted above. 4. Arendt, The Human Condition, 7. Note that this (original) English version of Arendt’s text employs the outdated usage for what is at present termed “humans” and “humankind.” 5. Ibid., 8. 6. Plato, Socrates’ Defense (Apology), trans. Hugh Tredennick, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1961), 19a–c. 7. Plato, Crito, trans. Hugh Tredennick, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, 43a. 8. Arendt, “Socrates,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 6. 9. Ibid., 15. 10. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1999), 1179a.  11. Arendt, The Human Condition, 13. 12. Cf. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Harris Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 1277b. 13. Arendt, The Human Condition, 15. 14. Ibid. 15. Cf. Kurt Flasch, Das philosophische Denken im Mittelalter. Von Augustin zu Machiavelli (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2013), Erster Teil: Grundlegung der mittelalterlichen Philosophie. 16. Arendt, The Human Condition, 176. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 182. 19. Ibid. 20. Arendt, “Eintrag [12], Heft XVIII,” in Denktagebuch, Erster Band: 1950–1973 (Munich: Piper, 2016), 428. 21. Arendt, “Eintrag [19], Heft IX, Juni 1952,” in Denktagebuch, Erster Band: 1950–1973, 214. 22. Arendt, “Eintrag [13], Heft XI, Oktober 1952,” in Denktagebuch, Erster Band: 1950–1973, 263. What is in relation to something corresponds to the pros ti as a relation in Aristotle’s doctrine of categories. Cf. Aristotle, The Categories on Interpretation, VII, 6a, ed. and trans. Harold P. Cooke (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1962), 46f.: “We call a thing relative, when it is said to be such as it is from its being of some other thing or, if not, from its being related to something in some other way.” 23. Arendt, “Eintrag [19], Heft IX, Juni 1952,” in Denktagebuch, Erster Band: 1950–1973, 215. 24. See: Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1991), 55–62: “On the Emotions, or Perturbations of the Mind.” 25. Arendt, “Eintrag [60], Heft XX, Januar 1955,” in Denktagebuch, Erster Band: 1950–1973, 509.

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26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Arendt, “Eintrag [2], Heft I,” in Denktagebuch, Erster Band: 1950–1973 (Munich: Piper, 2016), 8. 29. Arendt, The Human Condition, 184. 30. Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts About Lessing,” trans. C. and R. Winston in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 19. 31. Ibid., 19f. 32. Ibid., 20. 33. William Faulkner, A Fable (New York: Vintage, 1978), 105. 34. Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts About Lessing,” 20f. 35. Ibid., 21. 36. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Der Tragödie erster Teil (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1986), 3, found in its dedication and as subsequently cited by Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts About Lessing,” 21. 37. Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts About Lessing,” 21. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 22. 40. Thomas Schestag, Die unbewältigte Sprache. Hannah Arendts Theorie der Dichtung (Basel: Urs Engeler, 2006), 26. 41. Ibid., 27. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts About Lessing,” 24. 46. Schestag, Die unbewältigte Sprache, 28. 47. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a. 48. Arendt, “Socrates,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 18. 49. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Nathan the Wise; A Dramatic Poem in Five Acts,” trans. B. Q. Morgan in Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnhelm, and Other Plays and Writings, ed. Peter Demetz with a foreword by Hannah Arendt (New York: Continuum, 1991), act II, scene 5, 213f. 50. Ibid., act I, scene 3, p. 186. 51. Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 164: “Fundamental Law of Pure Practical Reason.” 52. Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts About Lessing,” 27f. 53. Schestag, Die unbewältigte Sprache, 30. 54. Cf. Ibid., 30. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 33. 58. Hannah Arendt, “‘What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Günter Gaus” (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 13. 

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59. Schestag, Die unbewältigte Sprache, 33. Cf. Chapter 9.3 in the present volume. 60. Ibid., 33–34. 61. Ibid., 34. 62. Ibid.

CHAPTER 11 1. Franz Fischer, Proflexion und Reflexion. Philosophische Übungen zur Eingewöhnung der von sich reinen Gesellschaft, edited and with an introduction by Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, as well as supplemented with interpretations by Thomas Altfelix, Ursula Börner, Anton Fischer, Anne Fischer-Buck (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2007), 33. 2. Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, “Die Begegnung des Menschen mit dem Menschen. Vorwort,” in Proflexion und Reflexion, Franz Fischer, 18f. 3. Ibid., 12f. Cf. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes. Werke 3 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1986), 324 f.: “Der Geist.” See also: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Initia philosophiae universae (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1969), 39f. 4. Fischer, Proflexion und Reflexion, 34. 5. Ibid., 132f. Cf. Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, “Die Begegnung des Menschen mit dem Menschen,” 23. 6. Fischer, Proflexion und Reflexion, 132f. 7. Ibid., 86. 8. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 62. 9. Fischer, Proflexion und Reflexion, 91f. 10. Ibid., 101. 11. Cf. Gerhard Gamm and Andreas Hetzel, “Ethik—wozu und wie weiter? Eine Einleitung,” in Ethik—wozu und wie weiter?, ed. Gerhard Gamm and Andreas Hetzel (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2015), 10. 12. Cf. BernhardWaldenfels, Schattenrisse der Moral (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2006), 14. 13. In this sense, Bedorf points out the corporeal experience of the Self, in which “internal perspectives and the perspectives of Others intersect.” See: Thomas Bedorf, “Selbstdifferenz in Praktiken. Phänomenologie, Anthropologie und die korporale Differenz,” ed. Thomas Bedorf and Selin Gerlek, in Phänomenologische Forschungen. Schwerpunkt: Phänomenologie und Praxistheorie, no. 2 (2017): 55–75. 14. Waldenfels, Schattenrisse der Moral, 109. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 110. 18. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17.

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19. Emphasis altered here; the original (in translation) reads thus: “act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature.” See: Kant, “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals,” in Practical Philosophy, 73. 20. Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking,” in Heinrich von Kleist. Selected Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004), 406. 21. Waldenfels, Schattenrisse der Moral 111. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 112. 24. Ibid. 25. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1935), 134. 26. Waldenfels, Schattenrisse der Moral, 112. 27. Ibid. 28. Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 71. 29. Ibid., 71f. 30. Ibid.,72. 31. Ibid., 79. 32. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1928), 7. 33. Ibid. 34. Cf. Michel Vanni, “Verantwortung und Ungeschicklichkeit: Herkunft und Herstellung des Staates aus sozialen Ansprüchen,” in Staat ohne Verantwortung? Zum Wandel der Aufgaben von Staat und Politik, ed. Ludger Heidbrink and Alfred Hirsch (Frankfurt/M.–New York: Campus Verlag, 2007), 217. 35. Ibid., 217–18. 36. Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 194. 37. Cf. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 127: “It is defined as the group of rules that characterize a discursive practice.” 38. Ibid., 80. 39. Cf. Waldenfels, “Michel Foucault: Ordnung in Diskursen,” in Spiele der Wahrheit. Michel Foucaults Denken, ed. François Ewald and Bernhard Waldenfels (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1991), 285. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 286. 43. Ibid., 293. Cf. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 339. 44. For his foundational presentation, see: Waldenfels, Ordnung im Zwielicht (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2013). 45. Waldenfels, “Michel Foucault: Ordnung in Diskursen,” 283. 46. Ibid.

Notes

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47. Vanni, “Verantwortung und Ungeschicklichkeit,” 224. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 225. 50. Ibid., 226. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 227. 54. Cf. the various levels of response in Elisabeth Schäfer’s “Eight Border Experiences” (Acht Grenzerfahrungen) in an initial reception center for refugees on the Austrian-Hungarian border in Nickelsdorf, in September 2015, in: Schäfer and Silvia Stoller, “Einleitung,” Journal Phänomenologie 46 (Schwerpunkt: Flucht, 2016): 32–40. 55. Burkhard Liebsch, “Flucht und Zuflucht—in europakritischer Perspektive,” Journal Phänomenologie 46 (Schwerpunkt: Flucht, 2016): 20. 56. Vanni, “Verantwortung und Ungeschicklichkeit,” 223. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 228. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 230.

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Index

Abe, Kobo, 55; The Face of Another, 53–54 acquisition, active vs. passive, 73 acting, as an experience, 78 actions: corporeal experiences of performed, 27–28; plural singularity of, 167–68; in-between spaces of speech and, 167–73; theories of, 118–19; violent occurrences, 38–41 active life (vita activa), xxv, 161–68 actors: pathos of, 26–36; and relation to their masks, 52; as respondents, 201n43 actuality, 69–73 addressing, 56–57 Adorno, Theodor W., 204n7; on Chaplin, xxii, 28–30, 33, 34–35; “Prophesied by Kierkegaard,” 33–34; on the suffering body, 202n50 adumbrations, 22 aesthetics, in opposition to ethics, 34, 203n75 Agamben, Giorgio, xxii, 51–52 aisthesis, xix–xx, 1 aisthetics, of existence, 46, 185–86 alienness: of lived body, 73–74, 77, 79–87; of Others, 30, 35–36, 57, 73–74, 78, 103–4; phenomenology of, xxiii; Waldenfels on, 79–87

Alloa, Emmanuel, Looking Through Images, 25 alterity: as alien, 1–2; ethics of, xix–xx, 1–3, 185–86; imperative, 1–2; Levinas’ philosophy of, 8–13; relationships of, 102. See also the Other Antwortregister (Waldenfels), 80 Apology of Socrates (Plato), 162–64 Arendt, Hannah, 153; on the active life, xxv, 161–68, 220n2; in conversation with Gaus, 156–58, 176–77; Denktagebuch, 167–68, 169; fabric of relations concept, 169–73; on friendship, 173–77; “On Humanity in Dark Times,” 170–71; on in-between spaces, 167–69 Aristotle, 19, 20, 25; Metaphysics, 1, 20; Nicomachean Ethics, 164–66 Arnheim, Rudolf, 22 The Art of Seeing (Huxley), 121 atension, 181–84 Audiberti, Jacques, 17 Augustine, 21 Austin, John L., 198n18 Avatar (Gautier), xxii, 37, 42–46 Bachelard, Gaston, 17 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 81 241

242

Index

Beauvoir, Simone de, 125 Beckmann, Friedrich, 33–34, 36 Bedorf, Thomas, 213n61, 223n13 behavioral latitudes, 75–76 Being: artistic praxis and, 33; chiasm concept, 93–94; creation and, 99–100; naked, 31–33; as reduced to corporeal experiences, 31; visible, 30–31, 32 being-conscious, 10, 31, 93 being-in-the-world, 1, 95–96 being-sensory, 93 belonging-to-the-world, 1, 9, 93, 95–96, 100, 104 Benveniste, Emile, xxv, 154, 158 Bergson, Henri, xxv–xxvi, 198n12; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 187–89 The Best Years of Our Lives (film), 28, 202n45 Blanchot, Maurice, xxiv, 8; on Kafka, 110, 111–13; on Rilke, 115–17; The Step Not Beyond, 107; on writing, 114–18, 214n42; The Writing of the Disaster, 117–18 body. See corporeal experiences; lived body The Body Where I Was Born (Nettel), xxiv, 120–23 Böhme, Gernot, 197 Borgards, Roland, 144, 147 Brod, Max, 112, 214n34 Bruchlininen der Erfahrung (Waldenfels), 83 Buber, Martin, 180, 182 Busch, Kathrin, 201n42 Butler, Judith, xxiii, 60–61 Calle, Mireille, 132–33, 134– 35, 137, 149 Canetti, Elias, The Tongue Set Free, 151 “Canticle of the Columns” (Valéry), 63 Cartesian Meditations (Husserl), 69–70 Celan, Paul, 17; “I Can Still See You,” 12; “Language Mesh,” 8; Levinas

on, xxi, 11–12; “The Meridian,” 11; “Praise of Distance,” 8 Chaplin, Charlie, xxii, 36; Adorno on, 28–30, 33, 34–35; Levinas on, 30–33; Soupault on, 26–28 Chérif, Mustapha, 146 Cherrill, Virginia, 33 chiasm concept, 93–94 Chulochowski, Alexander, 30 City Lights (film), 31, 32–33, 36 Cixous, Hélène, 153; autobiografictions of, 137–38, 150; Calle on, 132–33, 134–35; The Day I Wasn’t There, 138–41; Jours de l’an, 149; “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 125–26, 131– 32; poetic praxis of, 131–33, 136–37; Waniek on, 129; on women’s writing, xxiv, 126–31 The Clown (Matisse), 71 Coleman, Ornette, xxv, 143–44, 146, 148–49, 151 commerce with the visible, 17 common life (vita communis), 174 consciousness: of language, 10–11; questioning of by the Other, 58; and sense, 93, 212n17; of the suffering body, 202n50 contemplative life (vita contemplative), 162, 165 corporeal experiences: Adorno’s encounter with Russell, 28–30, 204n7; of artistic interactions, 83; and artistic praxis, 23, 26; Being as reduced to, 31; bond between flesh and ideas, 13–18, 24–26; and creative expression, 72–73; handshakes, 81–82; intercorporeality, xx, xxiii, 1–2, 46, 73–79, 103; intersubjective, 31–32; and performed actions, 27–28 corporeal perception, 8–9 creation, 97–101, 188–89 creative eye, 22 creative thinking, xxvi, 189–95 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), 64

Index

Crito (Plato), 163 Därmann, Iris, 201n42 Das Andere schreiben (Schneider), 107–9 “Das überbewältigte Leiden” (Waldenfels), 119–20 Das Zwischenreich des Dialogs (Waldenfels), 74 The Day I Wasn’t There (Cixous), 138–41 death, experience of, 111–13, 118–19 Delcò, Alessandro, xxiii; MerleauPonty und die Erfahrung der Schöpfung, 97–101 Deleuze, Gilles, 110–11 De l’évasion (Levinas), 30–31 Delhom, Pascal, 38, 40–41, 61 Demeny, Paul, 205n42 democracy, 146–48 Denktagebuch (Arendt), 167–68, 169 Der Ort (Fischer), 182–83 Derrida, Jacques, 177; on Arendt, 157–58; in conversation with Coleman, 143–44, 146, 148–49, 151; on democracy, 146–48; on gender differences, 149–50; on hospitality, 154–58; on identity, 153–54; Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, xxiv–xxv, 149–53, 156 Der Selbe und der Andere (Djoufack), 109 Descartes, René, 73, 152, 180, 197n8 desire, 62–67, 128–29, 168 diastasis, 35–36, 83 Die Stunde (Fischer), 181–82 Die Umwälzung (Fischer), 184 discursive practices, xxvi, 190–93 dispositif, 190, 193 Dix, Otto, Kriegskrüppel, 38 Djoufack, Patrice, Der Selbe und der Andere, 109 Dostoevsky, Fyodor M., xxiii, 81;Crime and Punishment, 64

243

ego: artistic praxis and, 33; brutality of existence and, 31–33; as Other, 48; Pascal on, 5–6, 197n11; as prosthesis, 152; Sartre on, 198n13 ethics: aesthet(h)ics, 137; aesthetics in opposition to, 34, 203n75; of alterity, xix–xx, 1–3, 185–86; the ethical vs. the political, 58–62; of ethics, 153, 185–89; as interpersonal, 62; moments of the ethical, 92–93; of the Other, 59; phenomenological, 84–87; respect and, 58; responsive, xx, xxv–xxvi, 185–89; of responsivity, xxii, 55–57; seeing subjected to, 55, 207n21; of things, 100 existence: aisthetics of, 46, 185–86; ambiguity of, 43–44; brutality of, 31–33; carriers of, 54; Kierkegaard on, 34; Merleau-Ponty’s concept of, xix–xx, 1; mystery of, 102–3; Pascal on, 4–6; statements as a function of, 190–91; unfolding of, 2 experience: acting as, 78; Aristotle’s ethical theory of, 20; carnal ideality, 24–25; of creation, 97–101; handling as, 78; of one’s own death, 111–13, 118–19; of the Other, 105–6; pathic dimension of, 82–83; pure, 180–81; responsivity and, 23, 26; of the self, 31; sensing as, 78; subjective, 35; suffering as a limit of, 41; of transcendence, 95–97; of writing, 111–18. See also corporeal experiences Faber, Hans, 38 A Fable (Faulkner), 171 The Face of Another (Abe), 53–54 faces: enemy’s, 60–61; and masks, 51–55; visages and, 55–62; Waldenfels on knowing, 57 Faulkner, William, A Fable, 171 female Others, 61–62 Fischer, Franz, xxv; Der Ort, 182–83; Die Stunde, 181–82; Die

244

Index

Umwälzung, 184; Proflexion und Reflexion, 179–84 flesh: bond between idea and, 13–18, 24–26, 89–91; carnal ideality, 24–25; horizontality of, 91–92 Foucault, Michel, xxvi, 190–91, 193 Frankfurter Zeitung (periodical), 33 Freud, Sigmund, xxiv, 120, 127, 131 friendship, 173–77 Gaus, Günter, 156–58, 176–77 Gautier, Théophile, 48; Avatar, xxii, 37, 42–46 Ginsberg, Allen, “Song,” 123 Goldstein, Kurt, 80–81 Gronau, Barbara, 198n20 Grossmann, Vasily, Life and Fate, 67 Guattari, Félix, 110–11 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 110 Gürtler, Sabine, 61–62 Habermas, Jürgen, 202n53 habituality, 69–73 handling, as an experience, 78 heart, reason and, 4–5 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 52, 155, 180 Hermann, Gabriele, 110 heteroglossia, 81 Hinduism, avatars in, 45 Hobbes, Thomas, 168 Hoerle, Heinrich, xxii, 37–39; “Krüppelmappe,” 38 horizon concept, 10–11, 13, 60, 65–66, 72, 91–92 hospitality, 153–59, 194 human condition, 161–68, 221n4 humanity: desire for recognition as essential for, 52; as oriented toward possession and truth, 6; Pascal on, 4–6, 197n8; violence as a part of, 39–40, 204n11 Hume, David, 9, 73 Husserl, Edmund, 9, 10, 22, 72, 84, 91, 180, 202n50; Cartesian Meditations,

69–70; Logical Investigations, 10; Waldenfels on, 73, 74–75 Huxley, Aldous, The Art of Seeing, 121 Hyperphänomene (Waldenfels), 24–25 “I Can Still See You” (Celan), 12 ideas, bond between flesh and, 13–18, 24–26, 89–91 Identität in einer offenen Wirklichkeit (Vogelsang), 101–6 identity, 101–6, 153–54 illeity, 58–59, 207n32 image theory, 25–26 immutable events, 118–20 improvisation, 143–48 in-between spaces, 167–73, 185–87 infinity, 65–67 intercorporeality, xx, xxiii, 1–2, 46, 73–79, 103 intermediary spaces, 7–8 intermediate sphere concept, xx, 89–91 intuition, 10 invisibility: indebtedness to seeing, 24; of meaning, 46; visibility and, 13–18, 19–20, 21, 23–26, 94 inwardness, 48 Ippolito, Enrico, 131 Irigaray, Luce, 62 Izambard, Georges, 47–48 Jastrow, Joseph, 24, 26 Jazz (Matisse), 70–71 jazz music, improvisation and, 143–44, 146–48 Jesus Christ, 53 Jours de l’an (Cixous), 149 justice: called for by the Other, 5, 6; origins of, 60; respect and, 58 Kafka, Franz, 152, 153, 214n34; Blanchot on, 110, 111–13; Deleuze and Guattari on, 110–11; Djoufack on, 109; on Gulliver’s Travels, 110; The Metamorphosis, xxiv, 107–13, 122–23; Schneider on, 107–13

Index

Kamlah, Wilhelm, Philosophische Anthropologie, 118–19 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 73, 145, 154, 155, 175–76, 186, 224n19 Kapust, Antje, 79 Kierkegaard, Søren, 33–34, 180 kinesthesia, 9 Klee, Paul, 98 Kleist, Heinrich von, On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking, 144–46 knowing, vs. seeing, 20, 21 Koch, Gertrud, 201n39 Köhler, Wolfgang, 22 Krewani, Klaus, 56 Kriegskrüppel (Dix), 38; “Krüppelmappe” (Hoerle), 38 Lacan, Jacques, 127, 131 Lagaay, Alice, 198n20 language: consciousness of, 10–11; hospitality of, 153–59; monolingualism, 148–53, 156; poetic, 11–12; prelanguage, 84; schizolingualism, 151–52; speech, 81, 99–101; and the word, 81; writing as withdrawal of, 115 “Language Mesh” (Celan), 8 L’Arc (periodical), 125 “The Laugh of the Medusa” (Cixous), 125–26, 131–32 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Nathan the Wise der Weise, 174–75 Levinas, Emmanuel, 75, 78, 86, 153, 180, 213n61; Butler on, xxiii, 60–61; on Celan, xxi, 11–12; on Chaplin, xxii, 30–33; De l’évasion, 30–31; horizon concept, 10–11, 13, 60, 65–66, 72; “Meaning and Sense,” 62–67; on the Other, 48–49, 55–62, 198n15, 206n46; philosophy of alterity, 8–13; “Signification and Sense,” 9; on violence, 39, 40 Liebsch, Burkhard, 193 Life and Fate (Grossman), 67

245

linguistic relationships, 56–58, 153 lived body: actuality vs. habituality, 69–73; alienation from, 70; alien nature of, 73–74, 77, 79–87; ambiguity of, 43–44; identity of, 101–6; intercorporeality, 73–79; intermediate sphere concept, 89–91; as a limit, 2; pathology of, 107–23; responsivity of, xxiii, 74–79, 80–87; subjective vs. objective, 22, 74–77, 103; unity with soul, 1; visibility and, 91. See also corporeal experiences living connections, 22 Locke, John, 22 Logical Investigations (Husserl), 10 “Looking at Life with the Eyes of a Child” (Matisse), 71 looking opposite, 56 Looking Through Images (Alloa), 25 male Others, 61–62 Martini, Tania, 131 masks, 65; faces and, 51–55; masking with other, 152 Matisse, Henri, 72; The Clown, 71; Jazz, 70–71; “Looking at Life with the Eyes of a Child,” 71 meaning: invisibility of, 46; sense and, 62–67 “Meaning and Sense” (Levinas), 62–67 Menander, 42 mercy, 60, 64 “The Meridian” (Celan), 11 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 9, 12, 25, 43, 46, 75, 76, 78–79, 84, 213n61; on bond between flesh and idea, 13, 89–91; Delcò on, xxiii, 97–101; on existence, xix–xx, 1; horizon concept, 91–92; on intercorporeality, 77; intermediate sphere concept, 89–91; Orlikowski on, xxiii, 94–97; on the Other, 90–91; on perception, 21, 54–55, 91–93; Phenomenology of Perception, xxi, 10, 22, 54–55, 103;

246

Index

philosophy of the visible and the invisible, 13–18, 25, 94; The Prose of the World, 100; on Proust, xxi, 13–18; The Visible and the Invisible, 24, 94, 96; Vogelsang on, 101–6 Merleau-Pontys Weg zur Welt der rohen Wahrnehmung (Orlikowski), 94–97 Merleau-Ponty und die Erfahrung der Schöpfung (Delcò), 97–101 Mersch, Dieter, 25–26, 59 Message, Jacques, 67 The Metamorphosis (Kafka), xxiv, 107–13, 122–23 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 1, 20 Meyer-Drawe, Käte, 46, 53, 54 mimesis, 9, 20; Adorno on, 29–30; as diastasis, 35–36 Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti de, 144–46 Mitchell, William J. Tom, 24 monolingualism, xxiv–xxv, 148–53, 156 Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin (Derrida), xxiv– xxv, 149–53, 156 morality, 187–89. See also ethics music: democratic nature of, 146; improvisation in jazz, 143–44, 146– 48; Proust’s musical motifs, 13–18 Nathan the Wise (Lessing), 174–75 Necker, Louis Albert, 23 need, vs. desire, 62–64 Nettel, Guadalupe, 216n78; The Body Where I Was Born, xxiv, 120–23 Neue Rundschau (periodical), 28 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 164–66 nudity: as shameful, 31–33; visage as, 57–58, 66–67 objectification, 173–74 “On Humanity in Dark Times” (Arendt), 170–71 On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking (Kleist), 144–46

Orlikowski, Anna, xxiii; MerleauPontys Weg zur Welt der rohen Wahrnehmung, 94–97 “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” (Rilke), 115–17 the Other: alien nature of, 30, 35–36, 57, 73–74, 78, 103–4; antecedence of, 137–41; Celan’s poetic view of, 8–13; desire for, 62–67; dialogue with, 99–101; ego/I as, 48; as enemy, 60–61; ethics of, 59; face of as carrier of an existence, 54; force of, 3–8; intersubjective relationships with, 96–97; Levinas on, 55–62, 198n15; linguistic relationship with, 56–58; male vs. female, 61–62; Merleau-Ponty on, 90–91; monolingualism of, 148–53, 156; movement toward, 2–3; otherness of, 1–2, 58, 61; passivity towards, 48–49; plurality of, 161–68; priority of, 92–93; recognition of, 55; thinking from the perspective of, 31–33; as a third party, 58–61 “The Oval Portrait” (Poe), 133–34 Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, xxi, 3–8 passive life (vita passiva), xxv, 168 Paul the Apostle, 21 pedagogy for the senses, 120–23 Pensées (Pascal), xxi, 3–8 perception: actor’s pathos, 27–28; Böhme’s theory of, 197; corporeal, 8–9; and image, xxi, 10, 21, 22, 25–26, 103; Merleau-Ponty on, 54–55, 91–93; phenomenology of, 1, 9, 92, 94–97; vs. rationality, 21; raw, 94–97; and visibility, 21–24 performare concept, 6–8, 198n18 persona, 52–53, 169–70 Phaedrus (Plato), 135 phenomenology: of alienness, xxiii, 74; of Being, 99; of ethics, 84–87; of immutable events, 118–20; of

Index

perception, 1, 9, 92, 94–97; of violence, 39–41 Phenomenology of Perception (MerleauPonty), xxi, 10, 22, 54–55, 103 Philebus (Plato), 63 Philosophische Anthropologie (Kamlah), 118–19 place-in-the-world, 1 Plato, 9, 19, 20, 42–43, 59, 81; Apology of Socrates, 162–64; Crito, 163; Phaedrus, 135; Philebus, 63; The Republic, 20 plurality, 161–68 Poe, Edgar Allen, “The Oval Portrait,” 133–34 poetic affirmation, 8 the political, conception of, 58–62 “Praise of Distance” (Celan), 8 proflection, 179–84 Proflexion und Reflexion (Fischer), 179–84 “Prophesied by Kierkegaard” (Adorno), 33–34 The Prose of the World (MerleauPonty), 100 prosthethics, xxii; as acting in place of, 46–49; monolingualism as a prosthesis of origin, 152–53; as replacing, 37–41; as swapping out, 42–46 Proust, Marcel, xxi, 13–18 recognition: desire for as essential for humanity, 52; of the Other, 55 reflection, 179–84 The Republic (Plato), 20 respect, reciprocity of, 58 responsivity, 23, 26, 35–36; of actors, 201n43; Chaplin’s, 28; ethics of, xxii, 55–57; vs. irresponsivity, 81; of the lived body, xxiii, 74–79, 80–87; as responsibility, 56–57; responsive ethics, xx, xxv–xxvi, 185–89 resumption concept, 99

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reverse sides of the performative, 7–8, 198n20 reversibility, 89, 93 Rilke, Ranier Maria: “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes,” 115–17; Sonnets to Orpheus, 117 Rimbaud, Arthur, xxii, 46–48, 205n38, 205n42 Roman, Joël, 67 Rosenzweig, Franz, 180 Russell, Harold, 28–29, 202nn53–54 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 198n13 Schäfer, Elisabeth, 137–38, 225n54 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 180 Schestag, Thomas, 172–73, 176, 177 schizolingualism, 151–52 Schmid Noerr, Gunzelin, 202n54 Schmied-Kowarzik, Wolfdietrich, 179–80 Schneider, Gesa, Das Andere schreiben, 107–9 Schwarte, Ludger, 26 seeing: invisibility’s indebtedness to, 24; vs. knowing, 20, 21; subjected to ethics, 55, 207n21; ways of, vs. points of view, 22 sense, 10, 21; and artistic interactions, 83; and consciousness, 93, 212n17; as an experience, 78; and meaning, 62–67; of the self, 77 sexuality, 43, 76, 82, 90, 111, 127–28 shame, 31–33 “Signification and Sense” (Levinas), 9 Silhouette, Etienne de, 71 Simma, Claudia, 131 social field, 189–96 societies: openness in the emergence of, 198n12; relationships of power in, 5 “Song” (Ginsberg), 123 Sonnets to Orpheus (Rilke), 117 souls: transmigration of, 44–45;unity with body, 1 Soupault, Philippe, 27–28

248

Index

speech, 81, 99–101, 167–73 Starke, Ottomar, 107 Starobinski, Jean, 71 Stegmaier, Werner, 58–60, 207n34 The Step Not Beyond (Blanchot), 107 subjective body theory, 22, 74–77, 103 suffering, xxiv, 40–41, 120 Swann’s Way (Proust), 13–17 Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels, 110 technization, 38 Terence, 42 Thespis, 201n43 third parties, 58–61 thoughtfulness, 42–43 Tibon-Cornillot, Michel, 46 The Tongue Set Free (Canetti), 151 Topographie des Fremden (Waldenfels), 79 totality, 65, 72 Trabant, Jürgen, 150, 152 transubstantiation concept, 99 Trazaskalik,Tim, 47 The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Bergson), 187–89 unforseeability, gift of, 125–31 Valéry, Paul, xxiii, 17; “Canticle of the Columns,” 63 Vanni, Michel, 189–90, 191–95 violence, 38–41, 58, 204n11 visages: abstraction of, 65–66; and faces, 55–62 visibility: and Aristotle’s ethical theory of experience, 20; of Being, 30–31, 32; commerce with the visible, 17; increased by spiritualization, 46; and invisibility, 13–18, 19–20, 21, 23–26, 94; lived body and, 91; ochre cube example, 21–24; Plato’s theory of the visible world, 19, 20; rendering visible, 24–26

The Visible and the Invisible (MerleauPonty), 24, 94, 96 visual imagery, 23–26, 51 vita activa (active life), xxv, 161–68 vita communis (common life), 174 vita contemplativa (contemplative life), 162, 165 vita passiva (passive life), xxv, 168 Vogelsang, Frank, xxiii; Identität in einer offenen Wirklichkeit, 101–6 Waldenfels, Bernhard, 35, 57, 65, 73–79; Antwortregister, 80; Bruchlininen der Erfahrung, 83; “Das überrewältigte Leiden,” 119–20; Das Zwischenreich des Dialogs, 74; on Foucault, 190–91; Hyperphänomene, 24–25; on responsive ethics, xxv–xxvi, 185–87; responsivity of the lived body concept, xxiii, 80–87; Topographie des Fremden, 79 Waniek, Eva, 129 Was bleibt? Es bleibt die Muttersprache (television program), 156 Weber, Elisabeth, 60 Wertheimer, Max, 22 Wetzel, Michael, 156 Wills, David, 152 Wirth, Uwe, 198n18 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 24, 26 women’s writing, xxiv, 125–41 writing: Cixous’ poetic praxis, 131–33; experience of, 111–18, 214n42; improvisation and, 143–48; thinking, 131–37; as a withdrawal of language, 115; women’s, xxiv, 125–41 The Writing of the Disaster (Blanchot), 117–18 Zanetti, Sandro, 214–15n42

About the Author

As a scholar in media studies, Jörg Sternagel (Dr. phil. habil.) combines critical, historic-dialectical thinking with thinking the medial, which means that together with artists, scholars, and students, he tries to first question our present, the concrete states in which we live by existing conditions, which also means to explore the medial again and again in order to open up perspectives that not only reduce it to the technological, but also locate it as performing in-between in the thinking of a situation in the midst of theories and practices. In his work, media theory meets above all image theory, design theory, feminist theories, critical theory, cultural theory, performative arts, phenomenology, posthumanism, postcolonial studies, and theories of digital cultures. With a methodological focus on media philosophy, he follows classic tasks of philosophy, which make it possible to respond to discourses about formations of concepts and theories, their methods and foundations. Media philosophy then becomes the basis of the epistemology of media studies. Further details, also on his publications, can be found online, on social media, and his personal website, for example. Parallel to his academic career, he has worked as a nurse in public and private special-care homes for the elderly and disabled.

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